bombsaway wrote:The point here is we know mass killings were conducted against Soviet Jews, as well as Jews deported into German occupied territory, most notably German and Austrian Jews. There are no known killings of deported Polish Jews, about which Kube said this in his document here which speaks of a broader elimination of most of the Jewish population of Belarus
https://phdn.org/histgen/einsatzgruppen ... 10742.html"The Polish Jew is, like the Russian Jew, an enemy of Germanness. He represents a politically dangerous element and this political danger far exceeds the value of the Jews as a skilled worker."
Within the revisionist framework, if Polish Jews had been deported en masse into this territory, I would expect there to be reports of Police actions against them, just like there was against every other group of Jews in this territory. Particularly if their treatment was "hands off" and they were resettled in remote areas where partisan activity was much stronger. Your various hypotheses here simply don't make sense to me.
You seem to be unaware of the point I made previously regarding Kube's letter (and the subsequent response from Lohse). Here it is again:
The Kube document was written in late July of 1942, which was months before the turn of the war became abundantly clear. The war against partisans was top priority and Jews were largely inseparable from partisan activity. To eliminate Jews in targeted areas with consultation from local security forces (which no one denies sometimes included those "unfit for work", often including children who, frankly, would become a major risk factor over time if left alive [note the brutality of warfare]) is a much different undertaking than eliminating Jews from all incoming transports intended for labor and/or resettlement. The latter undertaking was not authorized, as indicated by Lohse's response to Kube, delivered in August. Jews from Poland were resettled in Minsk (see p. 579-581) and other areas, and the determination to eliminate risks of partisan activity became less relevant, furthermore, as the war became more obvious as a lost cause. The policy of resettlement, on the other hand, as a rule, remained constant.
I already cited the pages [in TECOAR] but to make it even easier/clearer for you:
More importantly, Harrison ignores Lohse’s reply (to Kube’s tel-
egram) dated 5 August 1942:
“I am afraid that I will have to refrain from taking measures, as the
practical realization of the solution of the Jewish problem is exclusively a
matter for the police. The full responsibility for the orderly implementation
of the measures is also theirs. You must under all circumstances prevent the
concentration [Zusammenballung] of Jews giving rise to the danger of epi-
demics. I ask of you to point out in particular this danger to the relevant lo-
cal authorities.”
In other words no protests were permissible even against “independ-
ent,” unannounced transports unsanctioned by the Reichskommissar of
the Ostland. The reference to the danger of epidemics is also important:
Why did Kube in his telegram connect the arrival of unheralded trans-
ports with the risk of epidemics, if the policy was to exterminate all ar-
riving Jewish transports immediately upon arrival in the woods near
Maly Trostenets, some 12 km southeast of Minsk? No, Lohse’s reply
explicitly names “the concentration” of Jews as the possible cause of
epidemics. By this is no doubt meant the hazard posed by the over-
crowding of Jewish ghettos and camps under more or less unsanitary
conditions. Implicitly the arrival of Jewish deportees resulted in their
settlement – not their murder – and under certain conditions this settle-
ment made possible the outbreak of epidemic diseases.
p. 579
Clearly, given the above, your presumptuous inferences about the necessity of documentation of mass killings of transited Polish Jews is less supported than the notion that they were, in fact, resettled.
I can only tell you a similar survey of direct evidence for resettlement of Reinhard Jews would take no time at all, because no such evidence exists. The discrepancy here is quite obvious, and I'll just say this about the reason I bring it up.
In the historical field, no mass event from recent history has been accepted without there being some direct evidence of it.
The motives, means, and overall circumstances of any given situation or historical record thereof are what distinguish some events from others. We have already established (and so far you have not challenged) the evidence that
the conditions to produce a total absence of documentation regarding Jewish resettlement in Eastern-occupied territories were absolutely prime ---
one cannot even envision a situation less likely to produce documentation for this type of resettlement than the situation and conditions which
actually existed in these territories, for Jews, at this time.
1) Limited evidence due to non-survival and Soviet treatment of Jews through immediate post-war: Offboarded at Zwangsarbeitslagers before reaching Eastern territories: 5%
Subjected to German forced labor in Eastern territories until death: 13%
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.): 20%
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: 3%
2) Non-production or non-preservation of documentary 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
bombsaway wrote:With your theory here you are doing something unprecedented. #1, are you aware of this?
Since when is historical analysis with rational, informed reasoning anything 'unprecedented'? We either
know Jews were killed at AR camps or
we do not. Clearly, your confidence that both the Germans and the Soviets would fail in their mission to bury evidence of Jewish resettlement is beyond reason (let alone the many other reasons such documentation would be limited by the circumstances, regardless).
Why do you have so little skepticism about a theory that has no direct evidence? Such evidence is literally the benchmark for any event being accepted as having happened. Do you think the case for the Holocaust would be much weaker if there was no direct evidence for it, regardless if we can say this evidence is questionable? (such as hundreds of fabricated documents and coerced witness statements)
So, not only do you ignore the capacity of repression between two governments that are known for their capacity for repression, you also ignore the direct evidence of a policy of resettlement written innumerable times in German statements and documents; the
direct evidence that nothing has been found under Treblinka but a shower tile and other garbage, and direct evidence of the same at Sobibor. You have little regard for the direct evidence of only scattered, limited remains at orders of magnitude less than "expected" at Belzec. You disregard direct evidence of numerous Holohoax liars, the official stifling of dissent on this topic, and of the scale and mendacious behavior of Soviet/Allied/Jewish propaganda networks persisting long after the war.
You also clearly cannot be bothered with direct evidence of Jewish behavior in modern society which fully aligns with a tendency toward large-scale conspiracy and deception, amassed power and abuse thereof, international subversion, etc.:
If the above are unfamiliar to you, please do not make the mistake of assuming anything on the above lists is even
remotely exhaustive. We could spend many hours going over each of the relevant categories above (among others) and how crystal-clear the fact of Jewish subversive activity in present-day, in fact, is.
The direct evidence that Jews have had power to lie, to sway governments, to produce lies as big as the "Holocaust" over time is undeniable. Most, if not all, of what Hitler said about Jews engaging in this sort of activity along his rise to power was remarkably accurate. To anyone with even a shred of honesty and broader understanding of this topic, the following from Hitler himself (in Mein Kampf) is seemingly prophetic:
It required the whole bottomless falsehood of the Jews and their Marxist fighting organization to lay the blame for the collapse on that very man who alone, with superhuman energy and will power, tried to prevent the catastrophe he foresaw and save the nation from its time of deepest humiliation and disgrace. By branding Ludendorff as guilty for the loss of the World War they took the weapon of moral right from the one dangerous accuser who could have risen against the traitors to the fatherland.
In this they [Jews] proceeded on the sound principle that the magnitude of a lie always contains a certain factor of credibility, since the great masses of the people in the very bottom of their hearts tend to be corrupted rather than consciously and purposely evil, and that, therefore, in view of the primitive simplicity of their minds, they more easily fall victim to a big lie than to a little one, since they themselves lie in little things, but would be ashamed of lies that were too big. Such a falsehood will never enter their heads, and they will not be able to believe in the possibility of such monstrous effrontery and infamous misrepresentation in others.
Clearly, the capacity for Jews and the organizations (or nations) they control to behave in the ways Revisionists have asserted would have come to no surprise to Hitler or the NSDAP, if they could see us now.
Jewish "eyewitnesses" (with the help of communist and Allied collaborators, each having their own incentives) had to ensure that their testimony could carry the weight of the narrative their global community collectively sought to perpetuate, fulfilling security as well as ideological ambitions. But since they could not effectively argue against what the Nazis had said on rational terms, they had to make it a moral battle, to simply perpetuate the notion that "Nazis & Hitler = Evil", and "Jews =
only victims". With that perception being the norm, then it doesn't matter that your narrative is so reliant on testimony and it doesn't matter that Hitler explicitly warned about the unique Jewish capacity to lie, subvert, and conspire (whether driven by genetics or otherwise). He was just an "evil man", after all, full-stop.
But back to your point on "direct evidence"... The bottom-line is that Germany sought to distance and dissociate herself from resettled Jews as much as possible which, naturally, entailed no need for document retention of any kind. Moreover, to the extent that bare-essential documents
could have been produced, they were easily eliminated over the course of document destruction on Jewish policy near the end of the war. And on the other side (the Soviet side), this government was far from incompetent or incapable of anything related to repression of narratives, including evidence, witnesses, or Jews themselves (up to and including the capacity for literal mass enslavement and extermination). Their motives to implement or otherwise give appearance of such "vanishing Jews" are obvious and must be factored into any question of just how much documentation (if any) should be expected from this region.
Here now is your "best evidence" of the Holocaust:
"Vague statements"... so, unless you'd insist otherwise, I won't bother.
This direct witness evidence you have provided, bombsaway (for Heinrich May, a German forestry superintendent with oversight over the Chelmno region), is a great example to work with. From what I can tell, it does not look like this particular item has been addressed in any major Revisionist work, nor anywhere here at CODOH (other than here, briefly:
viewtopic.php?t=11324). So it is worth looking at more closely.
First, let's just be realistic about some of the conditions of the time (wartime and postwar Poland, Europe generally). It is in no way unrealistic to suggest that many communist actors and subversives (or other opposition), even within the Nazi system or hierarchy, were never fully identified. So, we should expect at least a small number of Germans who were actually (actively) working against Germany. Let's agree it is entirely possible that Heinrich May (of whom little is known beyond the scope of this written statement) could have been one of those small number of 'resistance actors'. Fair enough?
Here is an excerpt right from the beginning of May's statement:
They demanded some wood for furnace fuel. Staegemeir had a serious expression on his face, which I did not notice from the beginning. Because Hermann Goering, Commander-in-Chief of the Luftwaffe and President of the Reichstag, was due to come to Koło County for a hunting trip, I thought the commando was there to protect him. I told the clerk to give Staegemeir some wood.
Given the "serious expression" on Staegemeir's face as noted by May, it seems implied that this wood was to be used to burn Jews. But how many Jews can "some wood" really burn? If it was actually extraordinarily large amounts of wood, why isn't this indicated in any way at all?
There are multiple examples I came across in May's statement which it seems unlikely or impossible that he could have known or personally confirmed. Here is just one example:
The Jews from Koło County were exterminated first. Many escaped to other counties, but the terrible fate reached most of them anyway, as it moved from one county to another. Simultaneously, Jews suffering from typhus and those suspected of being infected with the disease were brought in from the overcrowded Łódź ghetto.
When there were no more Jews in the nearby villages, others were brought to Koło by railway. From Koło they marched to an old building in the estate of the village of Powiercie, from where they were transported to Chełmno in trucks.
How did May obtain all of this information in his role as a mere forest superintendent? Is he simply parroting rumors? How much of his statement follows this pattern (and how would we know, given he apparently does not distinguish those elements which he personally observed versus that which he has gathered from others)?
I found the statement below interesting:
I believed Hitler did not know anything about those terrifying crimes, until the moment I heard his speech directed to the whole world, delivered in the Parliament of the Third Reich (Reichstagrede), in which he boasted that he was murdering Jews all over Europe and would annihilate the whole nation. Never had human history seen such a cruel criminal.
May claims that he had thought the extermination at Chelmno he allegedly saw was not authorized at Hitler's level until he personally heard Hitler boast that he was murdering Jews all over Europe. Of course, Hitler says no such thing about "murdering Jews", ever. But the statement about "the annihilation [removal] of the Jewish race in Europe" -- which was simply a response to a Jewish effort to annihilate Germans, much like "if you try to kill me, it is you who will die instead!" -- was being widely-propagated throughout the war and thereafter as some admission of the sort. It seems Heinrich May is trying to reinforce this empty propaganda.
He also told me that the commander of the special SS unit, Sturmbannführer Bothmann, was authorized to contact me about the reforestation of the burial fields in district 77. He said it was vital that those graves be concealed. Then he added: "At worst we will have to report those graves as the ones of the murdered German civilians. (Volksdeutsche)". Suddenly, it became clear to me how Goebbels reached 60,000 for the total number of the murdered Volksdeutsche. The photographs of the shot Volksdeutsche published in the illustrated magazines showed mostly murdered Poles and Jews executed in the forests.
Note that the above is absolutely unfounded nonsense but this type of deception (Germany's enemies blaming the Germans for anything Germany accuses others of) is perfectly aligned with what we've seen from her enemies in other instances of the postwar period (e.g. Katyn, an atrocity which the same author [H. May] seems to falsely attribute to Germany later in his statement, with, "Apparently, the order [to conceal an execution of Poles] must have come from higher authorities. It might have had something in common with Katyń.")
The various atrocity events allegedly witnessed by Heinrich May at Chelmno are interesting and absolutely worth some closer examination. Let's see if we observe any pattern. First, we begin with the ol' throwing/smashing/impaling/tearing apart babies trope:
Near the post office I saw how a woman carrying a small baby, probably only a few months old, slipped and fell. The baby was probably half frozen, since I did not hear it cry.
One of the escorting gendarmes grabbed the baby’s leg and threw it onto the wagon like a piece of wood.
Despite alleged German efforts to conceal their scale of depravity (May repeatedly indicates the gendarme efforts to keep away onlookers), this was done right outside of the post office. A frozen baby just chucked right into the death-wagon conveniently located outside this same post office. You don't see that every day, bombsaway. But maybe it happened.
Bothmann said to one of the people [a Jew] employed there: "Itzig, bring me some meal from the sack." The old man untied one of the sacks and brought two handfuls of snow-white finely ground bone meal. Bothmann asked him: "Do you know what this is?" The man was silent. Bothmann explained: "These are your fellow countrymen, people of the same race as you (Rassengenossen)". The man answered calmly and patiently: "What can one do?"
How evil can these Nazis be? It's almost unbelievable. This Bothmann character sounds particularly evil.
I would like to mention one more event, which took place in the graveyard in 1944, which speaks of Bothmann’s extreme brutality. A young woman forced into a gas chamber started screaming wildly: "I don’t want to be gassed, I prefer to be shot". "All right, missy," said Bothmann. Then he raised his pistol and pulled the trigger.
Bothmann again! He's like a cartoon villain, just the epitome of "diabolical". Or perhaps May has a particular axe to grind against Bothmann?
During the process of burning corpses in open pits, one of the workers who had to throw the bodies into the flames, jumped into the fire, perhaps in a fit of madness. One of the gendarmes standing by shouted: "Shoot, shoot!" Maybe he was one of those with a remaining spark of human feelings. But another gendarme shouted: "Don’t shoot! We want to see how long he will remain alive." They looked at their watches and counted how long the man kept shouting until he turned silent.
All those cruel beasts, there is no other name for them, used to be ordinary people.
Such cruel beasts -- not even human, these Germans! Look what Hitler created. Never again. We must never allow Jews to be filtered out of power again, in any country in the world. Or else it leads to Jews burning alive in pits, as seen here.
An old woman and her daughter wanted to commit suicide. She asked for a noose. Bothmann threw her a bra. The daughter lay on the ground and the mother put the loop around her neck. When the mother tightened the loop, the daughter started screaming out of fear. Bothmann and the accompanying criminals watched the horrifying scene with diabolic grimaces on their faces.
This is 100% believable and it definitely happened.
After all, they were Nazis.Let's focus on the real star of the show at Chelmno, the alleged "gas vans".
Heinrich May mentions the "gas vans" in a few different instances in his written statement. The first is when he and his son allegedly came across such a van that was stuck in a ditch. He says:
A peculiar, unpleasant smell was coming from the van and the men.
Presumably, we are supposed to infer that freshly-killed corpses were in that van. Obviously, decomposition had yet to occur... So, what sort of "peculiar, unpleasant smell" is he speaking of? Is he not able to discern the odor of human fecal matter and urine? Would someone label such an abhorrent odor as simply "peculiar, unpleasant"? How "peculiar" (i.e. "unfamiliar") is fecal matter, really?
Fortunately for our understanding, May further clarifies his perception of this smell later on in his statement:
Apart from that, the view had not changed in Chełmno itself, there was a row of buses packed with people, and on the road to the forest there were the tightly sealed trucks. A nasty odor, like the one I first detected by the truck stuck in the ditch, filled the air. As I learned much later it was an anti-typhoid agent.
Ah, there it is. It turns out these gas vans (or buses) were gassing with Zyklon-B! A new Holocaust discovery!
Or, May is simply conforming his own statement to narratives and themes already being peddled about regarding Nazi "gassings".
But wait, there's more. May makes clear that there is not just one type of gas used to kill at Chelmno, but two:
In the old palace in Chełmno, 250,000 people, German and Polish citizens, were murdered. The process went like this: the victims were divided according to their gender and led to some room where they were told to undress before taking a bath. Having taken off their clothes, they were rushed into a small room lit with a small light bulb. In the room they were crowded together tightly. Then the door was locked and the light was switched off. The small building was nothing else but a specially designed gas van. In the vehicle there were cylinders with carbon monoxide, which after opening the vent, filled the inside of the van.
At Chelmno, the story is that Jews were loaded into a van after undressing, presumably being told they would be taken elsewhere for bathing purposes prior to resettlement. Is it realistic that Jews (or May) ever mistook a van for a
building? May seems to be trying to import the same "bathhouse deception" story (already popular by that time) ascribed to Auschwitz and other camps into his story of Chelmno. And the "small light bulb" that is noted specifically as being switched off after the big & scary doors closed is a nice touch for dramatic effect.
Of particular importance is the fact that May suggests he was close enough to observe details of this gas van (the small light bulb, the door locks, the vent which releases cylinder-gas to the interior, and the 'building-like characteristics'). Is it
really believable that despite such close observation, he would have mistaken carbon monoxide
cylinders for the ever-more-diabolical setup of pumping engine exhaust directly into the cabin?
Or did he not see any of this at all? And if not,
why did he write a paragraph about it in his very own "eyewitness" report?I really hope you take the time to answer that last question I have bolded above, bombsaway. The "why" someone would lie about things like this is a very key and central question which must be considered in order to appreciate the Revisionist perspective. Perhaps that is the source of the gap in understanding which lies between us.
Remember, bombsaway, you listed May's statement as among your "best evidence" of the entire Holocaust. That means that, on a scale of 1-10, you would surely have ranked this document at a 9 or above, relatively speaking. I think that, given the above, this is quite concerning.
Here is your next example of "best evidence":
Since I have already made this post quite long, I'll simply refer here to where the above document is already referenced and discussed:
viewtopic.php?f=2&t=13696&p=100023Physical evidence such as the recent studies at Belzec, Sobibor, and Chelmno which specify mass graves full of human cremains and other evidence of body destruction. (Chelmno is the most damning here because the site is in the middle of the woods far away from the actual camp). Description of Chelmno graves here :
http://holocaustcontroversies.blogspot. ... refChelmno
How many corpses have been definitely proven as buried underneath Chelmno, bombsaway? Please provide the direct evidence which conclusively quantifies the figure you provide. Be sure to cross-reference your analysis with work already done by Mattogno to save us both time as I will probably start there, if/whenever you attempt this. Good luck.
Good evidence of the Holocaust is certainly not unsourced newspaper articles or pronouncements by government officials, whether American or Soviet. In every case you have to go the source. The problem with Reinhard resettlement is there are no sources.
The "problem" is rather simple: Germany says, "leave no trace of Jewish movement into the region" then "destroy all records on Jewish policy" (not to mention whatever was destroyed or modified in the hands of Allied powers or anyone they employed thereafter). The Soviets say, "remove any trace of these Jews imported from Germany by x and y means". These alone would account for your shock and awe as to why the documentation is limited. But I've gone the extra mile to over-determine this conclusion for you by providing an even more comprehensive list of potential outcomes, shown repeatedly, which you'd have to effectively rule out
entirely before you can claim that Jews were
necessarily, in fact, killed at AR camps,
which is exactly what you claim.
The lack of evidence around "Where did they Go" question is of course not in itself a reason to believe Jews were genocided. Rather it's about pointing out the intellectual bankruptcy in believing whole heartedly that something happened for which there is no direct evidence, while criticizing a much more well evidenced hypothesis.
The irony of you demanding more "direct evidence" from Revisionists is mind-boggling. How many Jewish corpses can you claim "direct evidence" for, bombsaway? How many Jewish
names? I can point to any local PD murder investigation and find more evidence than any alleged 'gassing' victim. The disparity in evidence is not even close, just not how you seem to think it isn't. Quality vs. Quantity = Quality wins (especially when the "battle for
quantity" is so shamelessly cheated/tilted to favor one side, i.e. via repression and persecution of revisionist proponents and views for now three-quarters of a century).