There is not a single mass grave of holohoax victims.

[Craig4]

Sadly we do have plenty of physical evidence, what with all the crematoriums, documents and mass graves and all. Your decision to not seem it isn't important. You probably need to find another hobby. Maybe try UFO's or CHEMTRAILS. This topic is too serious for you and deserves a higher standard of research than you are obviously prepared for.

 

[Vermonter]

When I visited Buchenwald in 2002 I saw the crematoriums - they were left standing. Bodies don't take up a lot of space when they've been destroyed in that manner. I should know, my father was cremated when he died a few years ago.

 

[Nick Terry]

Our back and forths are growing a bit unwieldy. At the length they are I don't know if anybody is reading them except us. If we're going to talk to ourselves we might as well meet somewhere and settle this like men. A drinking contest. A pint of ale each until one of us passes out. The winner gets to shave the losers eyebrows and declare his version of the holocaust the truth.


They didn't bring charges against Spanner for not making soap from fat? The importance of the soap isn't that it's a key feature of Nuremberg (it's not). It's just one example of what can happen in court when the technical rules of evidence are discarded and judicial notice must be taken of any official government report introduced into evidence as such. If neither West German detectives nor any of the allied military governments elected to bring charges against him, so what?


The point is that every SS man was a member of a criminal organization. Every SS man had the specter of prosecution hanging over him for the rest of his life. Having served time, besides being interned at the end of the war, didn't grant anybody immunity from further prosecution. You say that any SS man would have no reason to fear prosecution after 1955 if he were to speak out against the extermination fairy story. You say that any SS man living safely underground in the Americas could contradict the narrative without fear of repraisels. I marvel at the lack of understanding of history and human psychology that would allow somebody to believe that to be true. You don't come across as that stupid so I can only conclude that you're being disingenuous.
I'll try to explain one more time why former SS men wouldn't speak out against the extermination myth. No SS man, not even Himmler, could prove there was no extermination program. They couldn't even prove that they didn't know about it. The best they could do was to provide evidence that they didn't know about it.

Now, not all SS men were involved directly in the killing operations in the death camps. Because the killing operations were top secret, people were informed on a need to know basis. So the fact that a former SS denied the killing operations isn't very persuasive unless the SS man could prove he would have been in a position to know about the killing operation. If he was in a position to know about it, he was in a position to be accused of participating in it.

So no SS man spoke out against the myth of the Jewish extermination because it was futile and because doing so would draw attention to himself. Because we still have these ridiculous war crimes vengeancefests continuing to this very day, there has never been a time when or a place where an SS man could feel safe to speak up. There are numerous examples of persecution and prosecution which you simply ignore because they don't fit with your fantasy.

The fact that no SS man has ever contradicted the extermination myth is exactly what one would expect given the circumstances. The fact that no German has contradicted it in, as you said, the course of thousands of investigations is meaningless. The fact that the vast majority of these statements by Germans confirming the myth have been in the context of some sort of criminal investigation is a taint on all of them but it doesn't mean they are all meaningless.
The problem with all the statements is that they are all intentional evidence. More on this later.



Eichmann doesn't really count because he confirmed the final solution to the jewish question but he didn't confirm extermination. Eichmann also knew he was a wanted man so he wasn't exactly speaking outside of legal proceedings. But those aren't the problems that make Eichmann's statements irrelevant. The problem with all the Eichmann statements will be addressed later.


I understand your need to convince yourself that former SS men, or anybody else for that matter, could deny the holocaust without any fear of repurcussions. However that is simply not the case. The Eichmann Trial, the Frankfurt Auschwitz trials, Treblinka and so on have made the conditions extremely hostile to anybody contradicting the narrative.It's true that holocaust denial literature wasn't restricted right after the war. But it was illegal to promote Nazism in Germany since the end of the war. Prosecution wasn't always vigorous but theoretically it was against the law. The crack down on neo-Nazis at the end of the 1960s you mentioned would not have much impact on holocaust denial because, except for Rassinier, there wasn't much of a revisionist movement until the 1970s. It's true that HD material could circulate relatively freely all around Europe for a few years, but when it was recognized that the denialist position couldn't be refuted with facts, they began to make it illegal. Since 1985 in Germany, no former SS could refute the extermination story because doing so makes dead people angry or because Germans are obligated to make Jews believe they are the victims they think they are or some such nonsense. I'm not sure why but somehow six million Jews not being exterminated is a bad thing and it's illegal to say it.
Since these anti-denialist laws have only gotten more expansive and draconian in the last twenty five years, it has become impossible for any former SS man to come out of the closet. It's even impossible in most of Europe for somebody to publish a posthumous memoir exposing the holocaust myth because whoever published or sold the book could be prosecuted.



How many of these Germans nonchalantly reminisced about their involvement in the extermination of the Jews? Without seeing exactly what these thousands of Germans actually said it's impossible for me to dismiss them as rubbish. However because these thousands of Germans were speaking in the context of thousands of 1960s investigations, they were not speaking freely and openly but to avoid sanctions for themselves or those they care about.
And these thousands of investigations in the 1960s would have had no stifling effect on former SS man?



I think the fear of getting caught up the hunt for Germans to punish should he contradict the party line would be enough of a disincentive to speak the truth. Plus, reversing himself in the 1950s would mean that he perjured himself in his earlier testimony, wouldn't it?

I'm only speculating here because I don't know much about Konrad Morgen's mental state but if I were him I wouldn't want to do anything to revive my Nuremberg testimony no matter what. If Konrad Morgen spoke up against the extermination story, somebody could go back and read his testimony in 1946 and charge him with perjury just on the basis of his ridiculous claims. He discovered the extermination program when he became suspicious after hearing about a lavish Jewish wedding celebration that took place in a labor camp near Lublin and was attended by SS guards and Jews in the camp? "1,100 guests participated in this Jewish wedding. What followed was described as quite extraordinary owing to the gluttonous consumption of food and alcoholic drinks. Among these Jews were members of the camp guard, that is to say some SS men, who joined in this revelry." A lavish Jewish wedding in a death camp seemed suspicious to Morgen so he talked to Christian Wirth about it who confessed everything. "Wirth staged an enormous deceptive maneuver. He first selected Jews who would, he thought, serve as column leaders, then these Jews brought along other Jews, who worked under them. With that smaller or medium-sized detachment of Jews, he began to build up the extermination camps. He extended this staff of Jews, and with these Jews Wirth himself carried out the extermination of the Jews.

Wirth said that he had four extermination camps and that about 5,000 Jews were working at the extermination of Jews and the seizure of Jewish property. In order to win Jews for this business of extermination and plundering of their brethren of race and creed, Wirth gave them every freedom and, so to speak, gave them a financial interest in the spoliation of the dead victims. As a result of this attitude, this sumptuous Jewish wedding had come about."Yeah, that's believable. As is the crap about the Jews being burned without fuel because of a special procedure Wirth had invented.
Why would Konrad Morgen want to draw attention to that pile of garbage? Besides there's no reason to tell the world that he made up everything he said at Nuremberg. Anybody can read his testimony and see that it's nonsense. The fact that holocaust "scholars" use his testimony at all is refutation of the holocaust myth.

Morgen's testimony is meaningless as is the fact that he never refuted it.



They kept on providing evidence for West German war crimes prosecutions??? And you still want to maintain that former SS men had nothing to fear after 1955?



Incredulity at a question is often the mark of the man who has no answer. No need to answer however. What happened to the Jews when they relocated through the "death" camps in the East isn't relevant at all.they weren't killed at the death camps because there's no evidence of graves that could hold all the dead bodies. Corpses don't just disappear. Besides that, the vast numbers of Jews from the east who flooded the DP camps in the west after the war is a major flaw in the whole extermination thesis. Jews don't just pop out of thin air.



I have shown time and time again that I don't confuse ethnic cleansing with extermination. I don't confuse deportations with gas chambers. That is all.



Let's assume that he had actually said that. You have an Eichmann said that Heydrich said that Hitler said.



Except that Eichmann was never "at liberty." While Eichmann was 'at liberty' in South America, if he had said he thought the Jews were out to get him, would he have qualified as paranoid?



So wait a minute! If there had been no extermination policy, we would expect SS men to deny there was an extermination policy if not immediately after arrest certainly after 1955. But if there had been an extermination policy, we would not expect there to be a flood of denials? You need to make up your mind.

At the end of the war, when your country has been bombed back to the stone age and you are completely at the mercy of a revengeful enemy, you will say what you think they want to hear.

But that's not the problem.



You can live in your world of make-believe where the threat of prosecution has no impact on people. If hundreds of Germans confessed their knowledge of exterminating Jews in gas chambers to investigators it wasn't because they decided what the hell, let's give them what they want. It was because they feared the consequences of not.

But what the Germans said or did not say again, is not important.



Evidence or explanation which refutes a claim merely show that the evidence supporting the claim isn't valid. It doesn't prove that the claim isn't valid unless the claim depends entirely upon the evidence that has been refuted.



If it seems that we focus on no gas chambers it's because the gas chambers are at the core of the holocaust mythology.If millions of people are missing, then they are missing. Missing isn't dead. You haven't been able to prove that the number of Jews who are missing is greater than what one would expect given the context. Obviously some Jews died in Europe in the 1940s. Jews die today.

More Jews died during the "holocaust" because the "holocaust" happened at the same time and place that World War II happened. They died because the Pale of Settlement saw some of the most intense fighting in the war. They died because some Jews were innocent civilians and a whole lot of innocent civilians died. Jews died because of disease and starvation. Jews were killed fighting the Nazis. Jews were killed when they wouldn't fight the Nazis. So of course Jews died.

Jews were deported to camps in the East during the war. After the war, there was a flood of Jews--mostly Polish Jews incidentally--coming back to the West. They went to Britain, Palestine, North America, etc. from there. Where did all these Polish Jews come from if they were holocausted when they were sent east a few years earlier?

It's easy enough to explain what could have happened to all the "missing" Jews of Europe. That's only if there were missing Jews. If you want to maintain that Jews by the millions were exterminated in one of four or five tiny camps, you have to explain what happened to them. Corpses don't just disappear.

That is why everything the Germans said or didn't say doesn't really matter. The lack of mass graves large enough to hold all the bodies that were suppose to have been buried there is the problem. The fact that one of my guys allegedly looked for these graves and couldn't find them is not really proof of anything. More telling is the fact that none of your guys have even tried to look for graves that were deep enough.

Unless you can explain how the million plus Jews who were murdered at the death camps could be buried there without using mass graves, you have to concede that there were at one time mass graves at these camps. With 21st century technology, evidence of those graves could be located.



That's either a lie or you don't know the difference between an ethnic cleansing and an extermination. But it doesn't matter because it's just somebody talking.



OK, so the interrogators did know about gas chambers? You said the interrogators didn't know about the gas chambers until the detainees started yammering about them. You need to get your story straight.



No comment on the bold face sentence. You should study law so you don't say things that are so foolish.



You just make up history as you go along, don't you? You don't need to come up with proof of life evidence when there's no proof of death evidence. Taking a train ride doesn't kill people.



So they didn't do any investigation into the gas chambers? When the Germans told investigators about art work being hidden in caves, the investigators didn't go and look? C'mon! Interrogators must've done some sort of follow up to their questioning. The Allies learned about the Dachau gas chambers from the Germans but how would they know where they were unless they looked? They would want to make sure at least that there were showerheads or a door with a skull and crossbones on it to prove it, wouldn't they?



Hundreds of detail? OK. But how many witnesses? With these hundreds of details and who knows how many witnesses, why haven't they come up with narrative that is plausible? Actually it doesn't matter because the lack of bodies is reason your extermination theory left reality via the chimney.



They're only irrelevant to you because they make your story look stupid. They ended up in the Polish report that was presented at Nuremberg. They're relevant because they show just how low the quality control standards were at Nuremberg. Are you seriously arguing that the fact that laughably diabolical methods of execution were accepted as true and presented by the prosecution as true is irrelevant because they weren't verified before being included in the report?



You're right. The Belsen gas chamber is from my misreading of the Eichmann indictment. The indictment says that "Belsen was a place where Jews were exterminated with gas". It doesn't say gas chambers and it wasn't said at Nuremberg (as far as I know).

It's good to know that by 1961 scholars knew that Jews were exterminated at Belsen with gas, but not necessarily in gas chambers. Inspires great confidence in holocaust research, doesn't it?



When testimonies are fantastical and no physical evidence or any type of unintentional evidence exists to corroborate the testimony, the testimony can be discarded. Remember that at least five hundred people--many of them Jews--witnessed Jesus walking around and preaching AFTER he had been crucified.



I said I'll call it a conspiracy just so we can have a common language but don't ask me to explain how it came about. All I know is that there is no evidence of gas chambers or an intentional plan to exterminate the Jews and that most people believe there is. The disconnect between reality and fantasy is because most people don't know what is actually being said about the holocaust or they don't have enough real world experience to realize how stupid some of the claims are.

Your premise that something that is believed to be true must either be true or the result of a conspiracy is a false premise. So your demand to either explain how it isn't a conspiracy or accept the truth of the holocaust is strawmannery at it's finest. The holocaust is basically the world's most successful urban legend. Urban legends don't need a conspiracy to propegate but obviously they do.



Let me show you: You don't have any documents that prove gas chambers or plan to exterminate.



If all those things were true, especially Hitler giving a private speech clearly stating that the final solution was not an ethnic cleansing but an extermination policy, you might have something. But you don't. If you had real evidence of an extermination policy, you wouldn't even dip into the ambiguous third party hearsay evidence. The Posen speech. The Hoefle telegram. Vergasungskeller. These things aren't evidence of your Final Solution. They're evidence that you don't have evidence of your Final Solution.

Despite all the huffing and puffing, you still haven't refuted my contention, and you've simply added yet more misrepresentations to the already growing pile (are you going to reply to Bluespaceoddity by the way? I think he asked you some pertinent questions.)

My central point, which remains unrefuted, was that it is prima facie implausible that so many SS men would testify to extermination if there had been no such policy. This implausibility begins in 1945, when the war ended and the SS were automatically interned. The implausibility increases with every passing year, and continues until the SS who were in a position to know passed away, and no deathbed confessions or 'to be opened after my death' statements were forthcoming.

Against this implausibility, you have offered, to date, only excuses as to why SS men did not refute the supposedly false claims of exterminations. You refuse to label these as a conspiracy, but a conspiracy of silence they must have been, if there was no policy of extermination. Otherwise someone, somewhere would have come forward with evidence to refute the charge.

There were many SS men who had a powerful motive to exculpate themselves directly by setting the record straight and explaining what really happened to the Jews who arrived at certain camps, either because they worked in those camps (all the death camp SS) or because they were involved in organising the deportations - complicity in deportations resulted in numerous convictions which were as a rule harsher if it could be demonstrated that the accused SS man knew the camps were death camps.

If the supposed truth of no extermination is so obvious according to you, then it should have been possible for these SS men to explain themselves and say what really happened. In 1945.

The circumstances of the initial interrogations in 1945 are such that the Allied interrogators - in the west - did not at first dispose of all of the hard evidence which later came to light. Crucial documents (we will come back to those) were either laying undiscovered in many tons of paper captured by the British and Americans, or had been captured by the Soviets and also lay undiscovered.

The US and British interrogators in Norway, western Germany and Austria had only the testimonies of camp survivors, which painted a grim picture, but according to several generations of deniers, this picture can be handwaved away, and the 'true' explanation put in its place. But not one SS man offered this 'true' explanation. No claims that Auschwitz was a transit camp were advanced.

Indeed, none had been advanced in the war from Nazi newspapers or in speeches. The cluelessness of the SS as to the supposedly 'true' explanation has deep roots going back to 1942 and the refusal of the Nazi regime to explain what was happening to the deported Jews.

The western Allies instead interrogated more and more SS men - both those who worked in the camps, as well as members of the WVHA and RSHA - who gave ever more detail on the policy of extermination. I know of more than 30 SS officers and NCOs who testified to gas chambers at Auschwitz before Hoess was even arrested in March 1946, and I don't think that's an absolutely complete tally. There were SS and policemen testifying to other camps such as Chelmno, too, and more SS like Wisliceny, Hoettl, Ohlendorf, Rauff, Mildner and Morgen (plus his assistant Wiebeck) who were confirming that a policy of extermination was implemented and that gassing facilities existed, either vans or chambers.

We thus have many dozens of SS men confirming extermination and gassing in 1945 and very early 1946. No evidence exists that they were tortured, coerced, intimidated, bribed, promised exemption from prosecution, fed any lines or anything else. The SS men in question were treated in varying manners. The same pattern holds true ever after, which is why any claim that so-and-so testified in order to save their neck or avoid prison can be easily refuted by pointing to the testimony of another SS men who gave exactly the same evidence yet was convicted.

At the time, the SS were under indictment as a criminal organisation - this was precisely the moment when the leadership corps of the SS should have stood up and said, no there was no policy of extermination. IF there was no such policy.

Merely being under investigation, or being interned, or interrogated, or later on having the possibility of the Kripo knocking on your door and interrogating you in the Federal Republic, does not amount to coercion, intimidation, torture, bribery or any of the other excuses you have offered.

The SS men in 1945, held in internment, and the SS men in the 1960s, under Untersuchungshaft, were free to present the 'true' explanation and tell the 'real story'. Appealing to the zeitgeist as you keep on doing is no refutation of this point. The only thing that would refute this point is to provide evidence that there was indeed a systematic program of coercion and torture, spelling out how this was applied and what was necessary to keep the coercion in place. You have provided no such evidence, which does not exist.

This follows on from everything we know about the psychology of interrogations and confessions. Yes, some people falsely confess when in police captivity, but this involves a minority of suspects as a general rule. This is why the plausibility of claiming false confession or 'telling the Allies what they wanted to hear' decreases with every additional SS witness who was interrogated. It is plausible that 1 or 2 SS men might have been induced to falsely confess; it is implausible that 40 SS men would have been so induced, and it is utterly implausible that 4,000 SS men and thousands of other German soldiers and civil servants would have been so induced.

SS men at liberty, whether they had evaded internment as SS men by disguising themselves as Wehrmacht soldiers, or whether they had been released from internment, released from prison after being convicted, or had emigrated to countries beyond the reach of then-prevailing extradition laws, logically and necessarily could not even be oppressed by mere police custody.

Had Allied or West German police custody moreover been as oppressive and coercive and torture-laden as deniers claim, then there would be many statements to this effect from SS men who had been released. They don't exist, either. Which either means that the conspiracy has expanded still further, to intimidate former convicts, or that the probability - which is already shockingly low - of coercion is further reduced.

My argument is partly counterfactual. Historians make these all the time. We ask, if x was not so, what would we expect instead? It is reasonable to expect that if there was no policy of extermination, that someone would present evidence to refute it and offer the 'true' explanation. Given all of the other evidence, we can specify what that 'true' explanation would have to be if there had been no policy of extermination - 'transit' and 'resettlement'. This evidence was not forthcoming, ergo the counterfactual has been tested and the claim found wanting.

After early 1946, of course, ever more SS men testified to extermination. And ever more SS men did not provide evidence to refute a policy of extermination. The probability of no extermination decreases exponentially the further in time one travels, and the probability of extermination - based only on this category of evidence, which is not the only category - increases, although we are talking from 99.1 to 99.9%, leaving only a small doubt (as would pertain to any other event in the past - after all, we cannot prove a person called Napoleon ever existed by direct evidence today) which is essentially irrelevant to any conception of reasonable doubt.

Your attempts to explain away the silence of the SS contain a few hilarious foot-bullets, such as pointing out that reviving Nazism was illegal in postwar Germany (and Austria). But there I was thinking you had claimed that the truth of non-extermination offered by revisionism wasn't a neo-Nazi thing? Oops. Likewise, that Holocaust denial was eventually made illegal in Germany does not then explain the non-publication of books in the very many countries in the world - indeed, the majority - where it is not illegal. The law against HD could not apply, in any case, to a testimony which offered refutational evidence of the kind I have been specifying. Any German witness saying 'I saw 200,000 Jews arrive from Warsaw in 1942 at Dnepropetrovsk' who is smart enough not to wrap his claim in antisemitic verbiage and hoary old denier memes, couldn't be prosecuted for Holocaust denial.

At the end of all this, you are still left with a pile of statements from SS men and from other Germans which testify to extermination, no coherent, detailed explanation for how these statements came into existence, and no witnesses testifying to any other explanation. Please, apply Occam's Razor here.

One thing that has become very obvious in all of this is that you haven't even tried to make the case that the SS witnesses collectively were telling untruths. Oh, we've had you nitpick at Hoess and Gerstein, but we are in fact discussing 1000s of witnesses: probably 10s of 1000s to mass shootings, in such number that you are avoiding this part of the genocide like the plague, even though it amounted to more than 40% of the total number of victims; and 1000s who could present probative evidence regarding the death camps.

Every railwayman who was interrogated by the 1960s to the transports to the death camps who, even without setting foot in the camps, who testified to knowing that they were death camps, seeing smoke rising, etc, has to be explained. If there was no policy of extermination, why would they claim this? Appealing to the zeitgeist doesn't cut it.

Ditto every policemen assigned to transport duties who guarded such trains. Ditto every Sipo or Gestapo officer who knew what the camps were, every member of an SSPF staff in Poland who knew about the camps, every civil servant who was a Kreishauptmann or working for the district governor's office who testified to knowing what the camps were for, every businessman or construction official, every secretary in the typing pools - in short, any German who gave any kind of evidence of whatever quality, has to be explained. If there was no policy of extermination, why are they all admitting to knowing about something that didn't exist?

Within this much wider group, we have a substantial number who can offer probative witness testimony to the camps. The railwaymen and transport guards are as already pointed out, entirely capable of offering testimony to smoke and stench. There were many more visitors to these camps than just Gerstein. There are easily 100 German direct witnesses to Belzec, Chelmno, Sobibor and Treblinka who left testimony after the war, out of a total complement of maybe 250 such Germans who ever served in those camps. None denied they were extermination camps and all offered pieces of testimonial evidence towards the puzzle. For Auschwitz, the number is more like 1,000.

Taking into account all those who witnessed the use of gas vans in Serbia and the Soviet Union, the employees of the six T4 euthanasia institutes, and the SS who served at 'ordinary' concentration camps where there were also gas chambers, then there are certainly a minimum of many hundreds more direct and thousands more indirect witnesses.

So far, you've discussed how many such witnesses? Two? Three?

It's your claim that these witnesses somehow collectively and spontaneously decided to 'tell the Allies what they wanted to hear'. Without a detailed exposition of how this went down, your claim is worthless. Moreover, you cannot point to such a detailed exposition because revisionism has not produced such a thing. The same SS witnesses - Hoess and Gerstein - get attacked over and over and over again in denier literature. Faurisson managed to discuss, what? three or four witnesses in an article entitled 'Confessions of SS Men at Auschwitz'. How is that even vaguely scientific, much less conclusive when there were 22 defendants at the Frankfurt Auschwitz trial along with 91 other SS men giving evidence there?

So on this point - SS testimonies - I think we can await your argument, since you have not really even tried to present one. You've only been reacting to my skepticism of the plausibilty of a number of denier claims.

I'll deal with other issues in another post.

 

[Nick Terry]

Originally Posted by Dogzilla

The eyewitness testimony isn't as much of a problem as the fact that if you throw away all the eyewitness testimony, you don't have a holocaust.


Meadmaker: Especially if you also throw away all the other evidence.

Indeed.

Of course, Dogzilla also tries to throw away the documents, as we see here in this bald assertion

Let me show you: You don't have any documents that prove gas chambers or plan to exterminate.

and in this spiel

How much documentation (and I mean actual contemporary wartime German documents or as you said, "BY THE NAZIs) explicitly says Jews were being physically exterminated? I don't mean documentation by the Nazis that prove they were anti-Semites who stripped Jews of their rights, confiscated their property, forced them into ghettos and concentration camps, and wanted them to emigrate. I don't mean documents that use ambiguous words that need to be retrofitted with sinister meaning. I don't mean the redefining of the German language so that ordinary words become euphemisms or coded language to mask the extermination of the Jews. I don't mean train schedules or passenger manifests or anything related to deportation or movement of Jews from one place to another. I mean documents that explicitly say something about physically exterminating the Jews.

How many documents are there like that? If there was an extermination program on the magnitude of the holocaust, there would be documents associated with that. There wouldn't be one or two. There would be thousands upon thousands of them. The German cannot have possibly destroyed every copy of every incriminating document related to the extermination of the Jews. Enough time has passed for an explicit extermination document to come bubbling to the surface.

Where are these documents?

Dude, evidently you have not read very far into the literature if you have not come across these documents. We already found that you were ignorant of two documents relating to gas vans that describe the killing of human beings in entirely unmistakeable terms.

The Nazis carried out their genocide by shooting and gassing. The shooting side, as has already been pointed out, is amply documented. Even if there were no other documents relating to 'higher policy' or intentions, or to gassing, then this evidence strongly corroborates the witness testimonies relating to gassings. By wiping out all Jews in numerous districts using firing squads, the Nazis were committing genocide, end of story. You could, I suppose, try to dispute that this amounted to a policy of extermination and say it was all a case of 'whoops! genocide!', but that isn't very convincing on its face and is contradicted by numerous programmatic statements by regional and local authorities, as well as a number of statements from higher authorities.

These latter statements, which are considered probative regarding Nazi policy and Nazi intentions, are hardly few and far between. Like Goebbels' diary entry of 27 March 1942:

The Jews are now being pushed out of the General Government, beginning near Lublin, to the East. A pretty barbaric procedure is being applied here, and it is not to be described in any more detail, and not much is left of the Jews themselves. In general one may conclude that 60% of them must be liquidated, while only 40% can be put to work. The former Gauleiter of Vienna [Globocnik], who is carrying out this action, is doing it pretty prudently and with a procedure that doesn't work too conspicuously. The Jews are being punished barbarically, to be sure, but they have fully deserved it. The prophesy that the Führer issued to them on the way, for the eventuality that they started a new world war, is beginning to realise itself in the most terrible manner. One must not allow any sentimentalities to rule in these matters. If we did not defend ourselves against them, the Jews would annihilate us. It is a struggle for life and death between the Aryan race and the Jewish bacillus. No other government and no other regime could muster the strength for a general solution of the question. Here too, the Führer is the persistent pioneer and spokesman of a radical solution, which is demanded by the way things are and thus appears to be unavoidable. Thank God, during the war we now have a whole series of possibilities which were barred to us in peacetime. We must exploit them. The ghettos which are becoming available in the General Government are now being filled with the Jews who are being pushed out of the Reich, and after a certain time the process is then to renew itself here. Jewry has nothing to laugh about...

If you've not come across this document before, then you really, really, really haven't read very far into the subject. Given everything else we know, Goebbels is referring to the extermination camps of Aktion Reinhard.

There are many such statements. How many should one expect? There are such statements from Hitler, Himmler, Goebbels and Hans Frank, to name but a few key figures, behind closed doors. Earlier it was pointed out that such men, as well as other Gauleiters, referred in numerous public speeches to the Ausrottung and Vernichtung of Jews. Probably, an average one such statement per week in the key years of 1942-3 when the genocide was being carried out. More junior officials also kept on referring to the Vernichtung of the Jews in ways which cannot be written off as metaphorical.

The same policymakers also use terms which must be considered euphemistic. The reason for this seems to have been psychological more than to cover up the crime, since we now know that the Nazis boasted about their Vernichtung of the Jews in public. The politicians - Ley, Goebbels etc - are if anything more explicit and more bloodthirsty than the SS technocrats who had to implement the policy. Yet SS men too also referred to extermination and to gassing.

It is also not difficult to decode the euphemisms in a direct fashion. One of the gas vans documents specified that 97,000 had been processed since December 1941 and from its obvious context refers to Chelmno (named Kulmhof in German, and this appears in the document). Shortly before this document was produced in June 1942, Gauleiter Greiser wrote to Himmler in May 1942 discussing how 100,000 Jews in the Warthegau had been approved for Sonderbehandlung, special treatment.

What earthly reasons are there not to match these two documents and deduce, if it were not already obvious from other sources, that Sonderbehandlung means killing and in this instance it means killing in gas vans?

How are we meant to interpret the following document, sent by Victor Brack who was deeply involved in the euthanasia program to Himmler on 23 June 1942?

On instruction from Reichsleiter Bouhler I placed a part of my men at
the disposal of Brigadefuehrer Globocnik some considerable time ago
for his special task. Following a further request from him, I have
now made available more personnel. On this occasion Brigadefuehrer
Globocnik pressed the view that the whole action against the Jews
should be carried out as quickly as it is in any way possible, so
that we will not some day be stuck in the middle should any kind
of difficulty make it necessary to stop the action. you yourself,
Mr. Reichsfuehrer, expressed the view to me at an earlier time that
one must work as fast as possible, if only for reasons of concealment.
Both views are more than justified according to my own experience,
and basically they produce the same results. Nevertheless I beg to
be permitted to present the following consideration of my own in
this connection:

According to my impression there are at least 2-3 million men and
women well fit for work among the approx. 10 million European
Jews. In consideration of the exceptional difficulties posed for
us by the question of labor, I am of the opinion that these 2-3
million should in any case be taken out and kept alive. Of course
this can only be done if they are in the same time rendered
incapable of reproduction. I reported to you about a year ago that
persons under my instruction have completed the necessary experiments
for this purpose. I wish to bring up these facts again. The type
of sterilization which is normally carried out on persons with
genetic disease is out of the question in this case, as it takes
too much time and is expensive. Castration by means of X-rays,
however, is not only relatively cheap, but can be carried out on
many thousands in a very short time. I believe that it has become
unimportant at the present time whether those affected will then
in the course of a few weeks or months realize by the effects that
they are castrated.

In the event, Mr. Reichsfuehrer, that you decide to choose these
means in the interest of maintaining labor-material, Reichsleiter
Bouhler will be ready to provide the doctors and other personnel
needed to carry out this work. He also instructed me to inform you
that I should then order the required equipment as quickly as
possible.

The document can only be read as indicating Brack believed that of 10 million Jews the majority would die, otherwise he would not have expressed his opinion that 2-3 million 'should be taken out and kept alive'.

How are we meant to interpret the following comment from Wetzel, a civil servant with the Eastern Ministry, regarding the Nazi Generalplan Ost?

It should be clear that one cannot solve the Polish question by liquidating the Poles like the Jews. Such a solution of the Polish question would incriminate the German people until a distant future and take away our sympathies everywhere, especially as all other neighboring peoples will have to count on being treated similarly when the time comes.

Evidently, Wetzel not only believed that as of the time of writing - April 27 1942 - that Nazi policy was to liquidate the Jews, but that this would not burden the German nation into the distant future, unlike a possible extermination of the Poles or other peoples. Wetzel was evidently just that antisemitic that it dodn't occur to him that in the not that distant future, humanity might be outraged by the Nazi Final Solution of the Jewish Question.

I already referred to Himmler's Sonthofen speech, made on June 21 1944 to Wehrmacht generals. Let's quote it:

"It was necessary to resolve another big question. It was the most horrible task and the most awful assignment that any organization could receive: the solution of the Jewish question. I want to say a few words on the matter to this group with complete candor. It's good that we had the hardness to exterminate the Jews in our territory. Don't ask yourselves how difficult it would have been to carry out such an order, even though, as soldiers, I might say you would understand. But thinking critically as German soldiers, you can see that the order was essential. Because we wouldn't have been able to withstand the aerial bombing if we had had the Jews in our cities. I am also convinced we would not have been able to hold the Lemberg front of the Generalgouvernement if the big ghettos in Lemberg, Krakau, Lublin, and Warsaw had still been there. We cleaned out the last one, the big ghetto in Warsaw, in summer 1943. In Warsaw there were 500,000 Jews. I tell you this number confidentially. It took us five weeks of street fighting. Just the same, I want to answer a little question that surely you must have. The question is, of course you had to kill the adult Jews, I understand that, but how could you do the same to the women and children? So I have to tell you something: The children will be grown one day. Do we want to be so improper that we say, no, no, we're too weak to kill children. Our children can deal with them. Our children will fight that one out. But the Jewish hate, small today, will be big tomorrow, and the grown avengers will attack our children and grandchildren, who will then have to deal with them. I am convinced that this will be the case even if Adolf Hitler does not survive. No, we cannot shirk our responsibility to kill all the Jews. That would have been cowardly and therefore we adopted a clear solution to the problem, as difficult as it was. "

How can this be read in any other way except as indicating a policy of extermination? It simply can't.

You might well reply, but then why did they use euphemisms and why aren't all the documents this explicit? I already answered that - those tasked with actually carrying out the extermination had powerful psychological reasons to circumlocute and avoid spelling things out as unmistakeably as Himmler does above. Himmler was speaking after the bulk of the 'horrible task' had been completed. Frank, too, spoke more freely about Vernichtung once the bulk of the Jews of the Generalgouvernement had been killed, than in the middle of the deportations.

You might also reply, but how come Himmler speaks of killing all Jews when the Nazis kept some alive? This has been already answered as well, but let's elaborate a bit more. The answer is because the policy of extermination had to be implemented in the context of economic and political reality. Himmler was one of the chief motors of forcing through a policy of extermination, but even he could not prevail if other power players decided that particular groups of Jews were indispensible to the war economy or could not be entirely replaced by non-Jewish labour.

The results speak for themselves: the Nazis killed about 5 million Jews, not counting Axis crimes, and not more than 300,000 were alive in Nazi hands by the end of the war in the camps. Any other survivors came from mixed-marriages in certain territories or other privileged groups who were not killed because of the political realities faced by the Nazis, or they had fled into hiding. So the ratio of exterminated to non-exterminated Jews was 50:3. From sources such as the Wannsee protocol we know that the Nazis intended to eliminate this 'remnant' to prevent the 'biological revival' of Jewry. They congratulated themselves in conferences at the success of their 'biological eradication' of east European Jewry, who were regarded as the demographic core of Jews.

When confronted by resistance from the Wehrmacht in 1942 regarding the deportation of so many potential labourers from Poland, Himmler ended up in a straight faction fight and had to compromise. He secured the dismissal and replacement of the Wehrmacht general in question, but had to compromise on the retention of Jewish armaments workers, as long as they were held in camps. But he said 'there, too, they will one day disappear in accordance with the wishes of the Fuehrer'. This confirms the intention to exterminate all Jews in the medium term.


We can present many more documents like the ones cited above. You claimed that we don't have documents indicating a plan to exterminate. This is demonstrably false.

You can move the goalposts and demand the complete Gesamtplan mit Anlagen und Beilagen, but such a thing probably never existed and if it did, was surely burned along with every single other IV B 4 file. (We have the file index from IV B 4 in an RSHA registry, but not one single file. Every document from IV B 4 survived in the files of other offices or agencies.)

Same with whatever other goalpost-moving unicorn you might demand. The evidence that remains is enough to prove that the Nazis intended, planned and implemented extermination, and spoke repeatedly about Vernichtung, Ausrottung and Liquidierung in that context.

Let's see you explain what this sentence, from a meeting of the Foreign Office's Judenreferenten in March 1944 (3319-PS), could have meant other than physical extermination:

Die physische Beseitigung des Ostjudentums entziehe dem Judentum die biologischen Reserven.

Go on, give it a try.

Once you've jumped all the hoops presented above regarding the extermination policy in general, then we can look more closely at gassing evidence - although there is gassing evidence from documents already on your plate.

 

[Dogzilla]

Indeed.

The Nazis carried out their genocide by shooting and gassing. The shooting side, as has already been pointed out, is amply documented. Even if there were no other documents relating to 'higher policy' or intentions, or to gassing, then this evidence strongly corroborates the witness testimonies relating to gassings.

Shootings have been documented and that corroborates the witness testimonies related to gassings. How?

By wiping out all Jews in numerous districts using firing squads, the Nazis were committing genocide, end of story. You could, I suppose, try to dispute that this amounted to a policy of extermination and say it was all a case of 'whoops! genocide!', but that isn't very convincing on its face and is contradicted by numerous programmatic statements by regional and local authorities, as well as a number of statements from higher authorities.

Let me ask you this. Were there any innocent civilians who happened to be Jewish who were killed during the war? Were there any black marketeers who happened to be Jewish who were caught and executed during the war? Were there any partisans who happened to be Jewish who were killed fighting the Germans? Spys who happened to be Jewish who were caught and executed? Would any Jew living in Europe during the holocaust have died if there hadn't been a holocaust?

There are many such statements. How many should one expect? There are such statements from Hitler, Himmler, Goebbels and Hans Frank, to name but a few key figures, behind closed doors. Earlier it was pointed out that such men, as well as other Gauleiters, referred in numerous public speeches to the Ausrottung and Vernichtung of Jews. Probably, an average one such statement per week in the key years of 1942-3 when the genocide was being carried out. More junior officials also kept on referring to the Vernichtung of the Jews in ways which cannot be written off as metaphorical.

The same policymakers also use terms which must be considered euphemistic. The reason for this seems to have been psychological more than to cover up the crime, since we now know that the Nazis boasted about their Vernichtung of the Jews in public. The politicians - Ley, Goebbels etc - are if anything more explicit and more bloodthirsty than the SS technocrats who had to implement the policy. Yet SS men too also referred to extermination and to gassing.

The problem you're having here in the reliance on euphemisms and coded language. You can't simply retrofit words with sinister meaning and call it explicit language. What was the development/evolution of this coded language? When did it start? Who decided what words would shift meaning? Where is the rosetta stone that allows the euphemisms to be translated back and forth into explicit language? Did 'special treatment' always mean killing? Did it mean killing prior to the Nazi takeover in 1933? When did it morph into a phrase that can always be interpreted as killing? If 'resettlement' meant killing, what did the Germans say when they meant resettlement? When did the final solution to the jewish question become murder instead of emigration?

If you want to rely on the euphemisms and coded language approach to reinterpreting documents, you need to explain how this came about. How did the Germans themselves make up this secret language? Did this secret language get translated so the Czech or Hungarian collaborators would know exactly what was meant? Which one of the Allies first cracked this euphemistic code?

Until you can explain how this patently absurd invention of a new language came about and how it was discovered, you don't have anything that explicitly says extermination. And please to explain it in a way that doesn't sound like a conspiracy theory.

 

[Meadmaker]

Did 'special treatment' always mean killing?

I'm not sure, but you referred me to the diary of Dr. Kremer. In that diary, whatever it meant, he said it "made Dante's Inferno seem like a comedy."

 

[CptColumbo]

I'm not sure, but you referred me to the diary of Dr. Kremer. In that diary, whatever it meant, he said it "made Dante's Inferno seem like a comedy."

Not to nitpick, but "Dante's Inferno" was the first part of the "Divine Comedy." Which was a "comedy" in the classical sense.

 

[Dogzilla]

My argument is partly counterfactual. Historians make these all the time. We ask, if x was not so, what would we expect instead? It is reasonable to expect that if there was no policy of extermination, that someone would present evidence to refute it and offer the 'true' explanation. Given all of the other evidence, we can specify what that 'true' explanation would have to be if there had been no policy of extermination - 'transit' and 'resettlement'. This evidence was not forthcoming, ergo the counterfactual has been tested and the claim found wanting.

Your counterfactual argument starts with a premise that ignores the context. It would be reasonable to expect a person to deny their involvement with murder if they didn't commit murder and they were being interrogated by the local police. The SS men were being interrogated by a foreign military force which has defeated their country, is angry with them, and is gathering evidence for use in war crimes trials. There's no reason to expect an SS man arrested by the British is going to feel he can be as honest and candid as he would be with even the Gestapo.

You also say that the SS man, if he had denied extermination, would have come up with the true explanation for what happened--in this case transit and resettlement. The SS man would have no way of thinking that transit and resettlement would be an alternative to extermination. The SS man would know that Germany moved all kinds of people reordering Europe the way they intended. Germans were resettled into Alsace Lorraine. Poles were resettled. Ethnic Germans were resettled. This belies your own thinking in which the undisputed evidence of transit and resettlement of all ethnic groups by Nazi Germany is evidence of extermination of the Jews. But not everybody links those two. The explanation for extermination if there was no extermination is that there was no extermination.

 

[Dogzilla]

There were many SS men who had a powerful motive to exculpate themselves directly by setting the record straight and explaining what really happened to the Jews who arrived at certain camps, either because they worked in those camps (all the death camp SS) or because they were involved in organising the deportations - complicity in deportations resulted in numerous convictions which were as a rule harsher if it could be demonstrated that the accused SS man knew the camps were death camps.

You expect the SS men who were being interrogated by the Allies to have offered to explain what happened to the Jews if there had not been an extermination policy, right?

How many of these people were interrogated after it was determined that Nazi Germany had a plan to exterminate all the Jews and that six million or so had actually been killed? Because in the chaos of the war, there would be no way to know that six million Jews were definitely missing in mid-1945. In mid 1946 Jews were still arriving in the west so the net loss of population couldn't have been known even then.

When was it actually determined that there were six million Jews missing? At what point could the Allies be certain there was an extermination policy and that it had killed six million Jews? How many SS men were interrogated BEFORE the Allies knew the true horrors of Europe's loss of Jews?

How do you expect any SS men to offer an explanation of what happened to all the Jews before it was known how many Jews were missing?

 

[Dogzilla]

dd

 

[Dogzilla]

Let's see you explain what this sentence, from a meeting of the Foreign Office's Judenreferenten in March 1944 (3319-PS), could have meant other than physical extermination:



Go on, give it a try.

Once you've jumped all the hoops presented above regarding the extermination policy in general, then we can look more closely at gassing evidence - although there is gassing evidence from documents already on your plate.

All you have shown us here is that you have a whole lot of documents, or excerpts from documents that might be interpreted as sinister or not depending upon their translation or context. There're plenty of documents proving Jews were uprooted and settled elsewhere. There are plenty of documents providing evidence that Jews were killed. There's nothing here that says explicitly that there was an extermination policy.

 

[Architect]

I have just returned to this thread after a week or so away; on the one hand, I see Nick posting detailed references to evidential sources, details of those involved, quotes from official Nazi sources, and the like whilst Dogzilla mainly focusses on unsubstantiated assertion.

Really, Dogzilla, if that's the best you can do then it's time to admit defeat.

 

[Gawdzilla Sama]

Really, Dogzilla, if that's the best you can do then it's time to admit defeat.

He does that every time he posts.

 

[Meadmaker]

How do you expect any SS men to offer an explanation of what happened to all the Jews before it was known how many Jews were missing?

Couldn't they have just told the truth?

Oh, wait. They did.

 

[Nick Terry]

Your counterfactual argument starts with a premise that ignores the context. It would be reasonable to expect a person to deny their involvement with murder if they didn't commit murder and they were being interrogated by the local police. The SS men were being interrogated by a foreign military force which has defeated their country, is angry with them, and is gathering evidence for use in war crimes trials. There's no reason to expect an SS man arrested by the British is going to feel he can be as honest and candid as he would be with even the Gestapo.

This still doesn't explain why an ever increasing number of SS men gave testimonial evidence to something that you claim didn't happen. One or two doing so might be plausible. When the number gets into double figures, and then treble figures, there's something more going on here than the SS 'telling the Allies what they want to hear'.

You also say that the SS man, if he had denied extermination, would have come up with the true explanation for what happened--in this case transit and resettlement. The SS man would have no way of thinking that transit and resettlement would be an alternative to extermination. The SS man would know that Germany moved all kinds of people reordering Europe the way they intended. Germans were resettled into Alsace Lorraine. Poles were resettled. Ethnic Germans were resettled. This belies your own thinking in which the undisputed evidence of transit and resettlement of all ethnic groups by Nazi Germany is evidence of extermination of the Jews. But not everybody links those two. The explanation for extermination if there was no extermination is that there was no extermination.

And here we see your problem. You speak of 'the SS man' as if every witness can be treated individually rather than examined as a class. One individual SS man might be indeed truly clueless on what the true explanation was, but if 10 SS men fail to give the true explanation, then 30, then 50, then 100, then many hundreds, then it does not seem very probable that there ever was an alternative explanation.

This is very simple to demonstrate using elementary probability. If for arguments' sake we peg the chilling effect of captivity and interrogation at 90% - itself a hugely tall claim - then 1 in 10 should have not been intimidated and told the truth. There should therefore be a substantial number of SS men who told what you think is the truth.

You're of course welcome to argue that such SS men did exist, but their interrogation protocols were torn up or they were bumped off by the evil scheming Allies, but then we're back into conspiracy land.

Arguing that the chilling effect was higher still = 99%, or god forbid 100% - is a truly extraordinary claim that flies in the face of what we would reasonably expect.

And contrary to your supposition that the SS in question wouldn't have known what really happened - wtf? Jews arrived at Auschwitz and Treblinka en masse. At Auschwitz, some were selected, the rest gassed. At Treblinka, other than a tiny minority spared for labour, all were gassed. Any SS man who worked at these camps knew that Jews arrived en masse. The only possible alternative explanation is that the Jews were sieved at these sites and were transferred elsewhere.

That is what the supposed cutting-edge deniers have to claim today in order to explain away the evidence, yet they ignore the fact that this excuse was not offered at the time.

Of course, as we've now comfortably established, their credulity and your credulity towards the improbably tall tale of a 100% chilling effect from mere captivity and mere interrogation, is virtually absolute, and in the absence of any evidence or detailed exposition, is entirely faith based.

 

[Nick Terry]

You expect the SS men who were being interrogated by the Allies to have offered to explain what happened to the Jews if there had not been an extermination policy, right?

How many of these people were interrogated after it was determined that Nazi Germany had a plan to exterminate all the Jews and that six million or so had actually been killed? Because in the chaos of the war, there would be no way to know that six million Jews were definitely missing in mid-1945. In mid 1946 Jews were still arriving in the west so the net loss of population couldn't have been known even then.

When was it actually determined that there were six million Jews missing? At what point could the Allies be certain there was an extermination policy and that it had killed six million Jews? How many SS men were interrogated BEFORE the Allies knew the true horrors of Europe's loss of Jews?

How do you expect any SS men to offer an explanation of what happened to all the Jews before it was known how many Jews were missing?

Obfuscation at its finest.

I expect the SS men to explain what happened as they saw it from their vantage point. I don't expect lowly privates to know exact numbers, I do expect them to know, if they served at a camp like Auschwitz, what the general procedures were for handling arriving Jewish deportation transports. This is a qualitative, not a quantitative issue. The higher one goes up the chain of command inside Auschwitz, then the more one would expect them to know about how the camp operated.

You are expecting the SS to argue from ignorance, in essence. What could they get away with, seems to be your underlying assumption. Actually, in May 1945 they could not reasonably get away with claiming that Jewish transports arriving in Auschwitz weren't selected. An ever growing number of Auschwitz survivors were offering their testimonies to this specific point: they arrived on trains with 1000 or 2000 or 3000 people, were greeted on the ramp by SS men, who sorted them out, sending one column into the camp and the other... to the gas chambers.

That was the SOP. If it wasn't, then one expects that someone would describe the actual SOP. But they didn't, because it didn't exist.

 

[Nick Terry]

Indeed.

Shootings have been documented and that corroborates the witness testimonies related to gassings. How?

By providing direct evidence of a policy of extermination. It isn't possible to shoot 1 million people of an ethnic minority while your leadership are publicly screaming about Ausrottung and Vernichtung on practically a weekly basis, and for the evidence of 1 million shot to death not to constitute evidence of a policy of extermination.

In fact, there is documentary evidence showing far more than 1 million were shot, there is also documentary evidence - which you have handwaved away - that this was state policy, as outlined by very high level Nazis like Himmler, and there is documentary evidence of gassing.

It follows quite naturally that if the Nazis were capable of shooting 1 million Jews, that they were also capable of killing 5 million Jews by a combination of means. Once the threshold into seven figures is crossed, then this can no longer be explained away by references to executing spies.

Let me ask you this. Were there any innocent civilians who happened to be Jewish who were killed during the war?

Sure.

Were there any black marketeers who happened to be Jewish who were caught and executed during the war?

The civilised penalty for black marketeering is not a death sentence. I'm unaware that black marketeers were routinely executed in France, or Poland.

In fact, the Generalgouvernement administration applied the death penalty not to Jewish black marketeers, but to anyone found outside the boundaries of the ghetto, following the handing down of what is known as the Schiessbefehl in October 1941.

I have before me a document, which has long been known to specialist researchers, which indicates that the Kommandeur der Ordnungspolizei in the Lublin district carried out this Schiessbefehl and over a period of 2 months at the start of 1942, executed 873 Jews for 'wandering around'.

Nice people, the Nazis.

Were there any partisans who happened to be Jewish who were killed fighting the Germans?

Yes, of course. But there were very few Jews in the Soviet partisan movement as it was organised in 1941. There were some Jews who later on fled to the partisans because they were Jewish.

And there were a very great many Jews who were executed in 'ratio reprisals' (10:1, 100:1) who had been arrested or interned merely because they were Jewish, and were shot because they were the most convenient 'hostages' to hand.

About 1,600 Austrian Jews were forced into Yugoslavia during the 'emigration' phase from 1938-41, and fell into German hands when Yugoslavia was overrun in 1941, 1,107 being interned in a camp at Kragujevac. They were thus, already behind barbed wire when the order came down to shoot them in reprisal for the actions of Tito's partisans in the autumn of 1941.

Spys who happened to be Jewish who were caught and executed?

I'm sure there were some, but there were very few spies overall and such executions cannot explain all the shootings.

Would any Jew living in Europe during the holocaust have died if there hadn't been a holocaust?

Quite a few did. Soldiers serving in the Polish Army and Red Army took heavy casualties in combat against German forces, easily more than 200,000 being killed in this fashion. They're not counted in the 5.3 million victims of the Holocaust.

10s of 1000s of German, Austrian and Czech Jews expired from natural causes or premature deaths from illnesses that might have been exacerbated by the short rations and lack of medical care allowed to Jews under the benevolent tutelage of the Nazis. They aren't considered unequivocal Holocaust victims, either, though they're certainly part of the demographic loss.

I can imagine that Jews in Belgium died from war related causes from 1940-44, but such deaths aren't counted among the 24,000 Jewish dead listed in the usual tabulations, as these are counted solely from among those who were deported because they were Jewish.

In France, about 72,000 Jews did not return from Jewish deportation transports, i.e. they were deported because they were Jewish. About 1000 Jews do not appear to have returned from 'punishment' transports, but the reasons for their arrests and intermingling with French prisoners is often to be traced back to their Jewishness. About 1100 were shot, again many being shot because their Jewishness made them excellent hostages in the eyes of the Nazis, who had strange ideas about how to impress the French resistance with their resolve. And about 3000 - this is the most uncertain number - died in internment camps, where they had been put because they were Jewish.

Nowhere in these figures are there any civilian casualties from collateral damage caused by fighting or bombing. I'm sure there must have been some, but Normandy wasn't known for its substantial Jewish population before the war, and Paris wasn't fought over until 1944, and by then there cannot have been very many Jews left in the city, as the rest had been deported or fled.

It's all rather pie in the sky to try and work out how many Jews would have been killed had the Nazis not been raving antisemites. Their policies and actions guaranteed that from a fairly early stage - the 'hostages' crisis in 1941 in France - any Jews caught up in reprisals and repressions were being victimised on the grounds of their Jewishness and not for their actual actions.

Most of the reprisal shootings, and a very large proportion of the deportations of Frenchmen, came in 1944, when the Nazis took the gloves off and started wiping out entire French villages, as had become customary in the Soviet Union, Poland, Greece, Yugoslavia and Italy.

Even in Poland, it's not very convincing to claim that there would have been very many Jewish deaths from 'mere' reprisals. In 1939-41 the Germans kept the Jews behind ghetto walls, shooting them for breaking made-up rules that didn't apply in the same way to Poles, or just for the hell of it. Jews started dying simply to amuse Nazis in September 1939. Rations were issued on a discriminatory racist basis so that Jews received the least of any nationality and therefore any deaths from starvation must be laid squarely at the feet of the Nazis.

The numerous executions of Polish resistance fighters or more often, potential resistance fighters, in 1939-41 did not affect Jews as much because of the ethnic divide between nationalities in Poland. Very few Jews could thus participate in the underground movement. I am in fact unaware of a single act of overt armed resistance from any Polish Jew from 1939-41. Maybe a very few highly assimilated Polish Jewish army lieutenants belonged to some of the early Polish partisan groups, but if so their names and fates are not recorded. There must have been some, since the Soviets executed more than a few such Polish Jewish reserve officers at Katyn. They're not counted as Holocaust victims, either.

Unfortunately, by moving against Jews largely before they moved against other groups, the Nazis have knocked your evidently very silly argument out of your hand.

The problem you're having here in the reliance on euphemisms and coded language. You can't simply retrofit words with sinister meaning and call it explicit language.

I didn't. I contrasted an entirely explicit document which indicates that 97,000 had been 'processed' by gas vans at Chelmno with a document that used a euphemism, Sondebehandlung, to describe the intended fate of a quota of 100,000 Jews living in the same region as Chelmno. You failed to explain this remarkable convergence of numbers.

It is however true that Sonderbehandlung can also be decoded by examining a great many other documents where the term is used interchangeably with execution, liquidation etc, so that we can be fairly sure that even where we find it standing on its lonesome, it means execution.

What was the development/evolution of this coded language? When did it start? Who decided what words would shift meaning? Where is the rosetta stone that allows the euphemisms to be translated back and forth into explicit language? Did 'special treatment' always mean killing? Did it mean killing prior to the Nazi takeover in 1933? When did it morph into a phrase that can always be interpreted as killing?

I know of one use of Sonderbehandlung in a context where it unequivocally does not mean killing. This was in 1939, and it appeared in a thinkpiece drawn up by members of the Racial Political Office of the NSDAP, ie a civilian Party agency.

By the same point in time, Heydrich and the RSHA were already using Sonderbehandlung as a euphemism for any extrajudicial execution carried out by the Gestapo, a practice that did not exist in peacetime and was solely the product of the war years. The RSHA asserted the right to execute Polish workers in Germany without recourse to the justice ministry or its courts and spelled out that in cases where the Pole was guilty merely of having sex with a German woman, that Sonderbehandlung was to be carried out by hanging, in public. From there the term spread to encompass any extrajudicial execution and came to be used extensively in the occupied territories, especially Poland and the Soviet Union. Due to cooperation between the Gestapo and the WVHA-run concentration camps, and between the Gestapo and civilian authorities, not to mention between the RSHA's Einsatzgruppen and the Wehrmacht, the term spread across the entire Nazi regime and can be found used interchangeably with execution or shooting in the reports of Army units and other agencies.

If 'resettlement' meant killing, what did the Germans say when they meant resettlement? When did the final solution to the jewish question become murder instead of emigration?

Actually the Nazis - please stop calling them Germans - used a variety of terms. They spoke of Evakuierungen, evacuations, on many occasions. Depending on the context, this might well be a true event - the Nazis did after all evacuate more than 1 million Russians westward from the combat zone in 1945 - or it might be used euphemistically.

The Nazis also used Umsiedlung - resettlement - and Aussiedlung - out-settlement.

Context might include the use of inverted commas in the original text. If a document says nach der 'Judenumsiedlung' and puts the word Judenumsiedlung in inverted commas, then this has obviously been demarcated as a euphemism.

Umsiedlung, Aussiedlung and Evakuierung could all be used to describe genuine resettlements of non-Jewish civilians. The reason that context determines that they are genuine resettlements is that the documents specify a proper destination. When these words are used to describe the deportations of the Jews, they are most often used with no destination specified. It is simply 'the evacuation' or 'the resettlement'. It defies common sense that the Nazis would omit to mention the specific destination where the 'evacuation' was headed on so many occasions, when an examination of a comparable set of documents regarding genuine resettlements shows that sooner or later the destinations are mentioned.

Umsiedlung, Aussiedlung and Evakuierung were also used on many occasions to describe shootings. This was technically correct: the Nazis had 'resettled' the Jews from the town into a mass grave out of town. One such document from the KdS Weissruthenien orders the Umsiedlung of the Jews of Slutsk thus

On 8 and 9 February 1943 there will be a resettlement in the town Sluzk by the local command the resettlement of the Jews there.
The evacuation of the Jews to the resettlement place happens by means of 6 trucks, each to be accompanied by 4 Latvians.
At the resettlement area are 2 pits. At each pit a group of 10 leaders and men will work, to be relieved every 2 hours. Times 8-10 o'clock, 10-12 o'clock, 12-14 o'clock, 14-16 o'clock.

I once had a denier reply as follows to this - I admit I had semi-flippantly said that the Jews were apparently resettled into a ditch.

What I can make of this text with my poor German skills (you could have given me a translation too) is this :
Commandos have hauled away a bunch of jews from the city of Sluzk. These people were sent for forced labor to a relocation facility in 6 trucks. In this relocation facility, there are 2 workings. Of each of the workings, groups of 10 people work who for two hours after which they are relieved by another group. This text makes perfect sense when taking literally. Of course, it does sound a bit strange if you translate the word "Grube" as ditch, but an online dictionary I checked does not even mention this word as a possible translation. Rather, it translates the word as pit, workings or pothole.

Mea culpa, ditch, pit. But the ninny seemed to think that the Jews were being shoved down a mine or pothole. Which would be hilarious, if it weren't so sad.

Unfortunately the document goes on to say

Als Patronenausgeber auf dem Umsiedlungsgelaende sind SS-Mann Kraft und Rottwachtmeister Altmann zustaendig....

Translation: SS-Man Kraft and Lance-Sergeant Altmann are tasked as dispensers of cartridges on the resettlement terrain.

This still wasn't enough, so I drew attention to the next line

Gleichzeitig ist Vorgenannter fuer die Gestellung der Munition zustaendig.

Translation: at the same time the above named is tasked with the provision of ammunition.

There are other documents relating to this action which further refute any attempt to take resettlement absolutely literally here. There are yet other documents which are headlined 'evacuation of the Jews from x' and then in the final page say that the Jews were all shot.

But no, I don't claim that every use of resettlement or evacuation implies killing. In some cases the term is used as an obvious euphemism, as in the above example. In others it is a half-truth. Jews were evacuated to Auschwitz. But not all the deportees were killed on arrival. So the use of a phrase like Evakuierung nach Auschwitz simply conveys the bare essential information for the intended purpose - coordinating deportations, usually - while omitting the intended fate. This becomes clear from other sources.

If you want to rely on the euphemisms and coded language approach to reinterpreting documents, you need to explain how this came about. How did the Germans themselves make up this secret language?

Actually, nitwit, I relied in my previous long post on pointing at documents like Himmler's Sonthofen speech which was entirely explicit and non-euphemistic.

The Nazis - please stop calling them Germans - used explicit language interchangeably with some euphemisms and some half-truths or deceptions by omission. One can proceed quite safely on the basis that every time a supposedly inocuous word is put in inverted commas it means something other than it says at face value. If the document uses an inocuous word and then goes on to use an explicit word, then in that context the first word is no longer inocuous. If a resettlement is ordered or recorded and there is no mention of an intended destination then one has strong grounds for suspicion that it wasn't a genuine resettlement. If the treatment of the Jews in the region which is suffering these mysteriously autistic resettlements is then described as the destruction of the Jews, then the fiction is exposed still further.

Did this secret language get translated so the Czech or Hungarian collaborators would know exactly what was meant?

Axis collaborators had no need to know, although I expect that Hungarian occupation troops serving alongside German forces knew what Sonderbehandlung meant. A Slovak foreign office official wasn't going to be told what the precise fate of the deportees was, and indeed when the Slovaks started getting antsy and wanted to visit the 'resettlement camps' the Nazis fobbed them off with a proposed visit to Theresienstadt, to which not one Slovakian Jew had been sent at that time.

Which one of the Allies first cracked this euphemistic code?

All of them, essentially simultaneously, since there were more than sufficient documents which exposed the euphemisms for what they were, and there were more than sufficient documents which used entirely explicit terms like destroyed and shot.

Until you can explain how this patently absurd invention of a new language came about and how it was discovered, you don't have anything that explicitly says extermination.

I have plenty of such documents, and cited a few already. Did you really not read the Sonthofen speech? Are you still having difficulty explaining away the convergence between '97,000 processed' and '100,000 zur Sonderbehandlung'?

And please to explain it in a way that doesn't sound like a conspiracy theory

The Holocaust was a criminal conspiracy, and the Nazis demonstrably covered up their actual actions. They screamed about Ausrottung and Vernichtung of the Jews in public then went entirely quiet on what they were doing. No press reports appeared in the Voelkische Beobachter reporting on the deportations, let alone what was going on in the east.

Behind closed doors, the Nazis used explicit language quite a lot, but they also used euphemisms. Sometimes this was to restrict knowledge on a need-to-know basis, but more often this was purely for their own psychological well-being, since it is easier to carry out mass murder if you use euphemisms.

This is why the Cheka bequeathed the world the term liquidation, which was borrowed from the procedures to wind up businesses. If you liquidate a business, then you are winding up a limited liability company. By definition the owner of the business is not dissolved along with the assets, he becomes at worst, bankrupt. If however you liquidate people, then there is no such limited liability, and the entire world in every language accepts that such a phrase = killing. It doesn't say killing, or execution (itself a term that doesn't say killing, but is universally understood to mean killing - you can execute an order and need not hurt anyone, but execute a person, and they are dead), or murder, or shooting, or beheading, or gassing, or hanging. By not spelling out the messy methods, it becomes easier for the superiors of the executioners to order the killings.

The Nazis also used the term liquidation - as we saw in the Goebbels diary entry of 27 March 1942, which you avoided just as you avoided Himmler's Sonthofen speech.

Here it is again:

The Jews are now being pushed out of the General Government, beginning near Lublin, to the East. A pretty barbaric procedure is being applied here, and it is not to be described in any more detail, and not much is left of the Jews themselves. In general one may conclude that 60% of them must be liquidated, while only 40% can be put to work. The former Gauleiter of Vienna [Globocnik], who is carrying out this action, is doing it pretty prudently and with a procedure that doesn't work too conspicuously. The Jews are being punished barbarically, to be sure, but they have fully deserved it. The prophesy that the Führer issued to them on the way, for the eventuality that they started a new world war, is beginning to realise itself in the most terrible manner. One must not allow any sentimentalities to rule in these matters. If we did not defend ourselves against them, the Jews would annihilate us. It is a struggle for life and death between the Aryan race and the Jewish bacillus. No other government and no other regime could muster the strength for a general solution of the question. Here too, the Führer is the persistent pioneer and spokesman of a radical solution, which is demanded by the way things are and thus appears to be unavoidable. Thank God, during the war we now have a whole series of possibilities which were barred to us in peacetime. We must exploit them. The ghettos which are becoming available in the General Government are now being filled with the Jews who are being pushed out of the Reich, and after a certain time the process is then to renew itself here. Jewry has nothing to laugh about...

I've seen some pretty grotesque attempts to explain away this diary entry, but you can't even manage a handwave.

 

[Nick Terry]

All you have shown us here is that you have a whole lot of documents, or excerpts from documents that might be interpreted as sinister or not depending upon their translation or context. There're plenty of documents proving Jews were uprooted and settled elsewhere. There are plenty of documents providing evidence that Jews were killed. There's nothing here that says explicitly that there was an extermination policy.

Lurkers! Time once again to call on you to comment on another Dogzilla handwave!

Does the above reply from Dogzilla constitute a rational response to the following quote, from a speech by Heinrich Himmler at Sonthofen on 21 June 1944?

"It was necessary to resolve another big question. It was the most horrible task and the most awful assignment that any organization could receive: the solution of the Jewish question. I want to say a few words on the matter to this group with complete candor. It's good that we had the hardness to exterminate the Jews in our territory. Don't ask yourselves how difficult it would have been to carry out such an order, even though, as soldiers, I might say you would understand. But thinking critically as German soldiers, you can see that the order was essential. Because we wouldn't have been able to withstand the aerial bombing if we had had the Jews in our cities. I am also convinced we would not have been able to hold the Lemberg front of the Generalgouvernement if the big ghettos in Lemberg, Krakau, Lublin, and Warsaw had still been there. We cleaned out the last one, the big ghetto in Warsaw, in summer 1943. In Warsaw there were 500,000 Jews. I tell you this number confidentially. It took us five weeks of street fighting. Just the same, I want to answer a little question that surely you must have. The question is, of course you had to kill the adult Jews, I understand that, but how could you do the same to the women and children? So I have to tell you something: The children will be grown one day. Do we want to be so improper that we say, no, no, we're too weak to kill children. Our children can deal with them. Our children will fight that one out. But the Jewish hate, small today, will be big tomorrow, and the grown avengers will attack our children and grandchildren, who will then have to deal with them. I am convinced that this will be the case even if Adolf Hitler does not survive. No, we cannot shirk our responsibility to kill all the Jews. That would have been cowardly and therefore we adopted a clear solution to the problem, as difficult as it was. "

 

[Meadmaker]

There're plenty of documents proving Jews were uprooted and settled elsewhere.

And yet, if you go "elsewhere", you don't find very many Jews.

 

[Hans]

Lurkers! Time once again to call on you to comment on another Dogzilla handwave!

Does the above reply from Dogzilla constitute a rational response to the following quote, from a speech by Heinrich Himmler at Sonthofen on 21 June 1944?

Not at all - he like all haters cannot explain where all the Jews, Roma and others 'went to'. Where did all the Soviet POWS go to? In all the Nazi extermination did in well over 12+ million people.

So hand wave not accepted. Explain in detail Dogzilla (be the first to do so) where these people went if not slaughtered by the Nazis in their Hitler directed extermination actions.

By the way my father was at the liberation of three of those camps

I think I'll repost the best piece from the excellent work of Nick

"It was necessary to resolve another big question. It was the most horrible task and the most awful assignment that any organization could receive: the solution of the Jewish question. I want to say a few words on the matter to this group with complete candor. It's good that we had the hardness to exterminate the Jews in our territory. Don't ask yourselves how difficult it would have been to carry out such an order, even though, as soldiers, I might say you would understand. But thinking critically as German soldiers, you can see that the order was essential. Because we wouldn't have been able to withstand the aerial bombing if we had had the Jews in our cities. I am also convinced we would not have been able to hold the Lemberg front of the Generalgouvernement if the big ghettos in Lemberg, Krakau, Lublin, and Warsaw had still been there. We cleaned out the last one, the big ghetto in Warsaw, in summer 1943. In Warsaw there were 500,000 Jews. I tell you this number confidentially. It took us five weeks of street fighting. Just the same, I want to answer a little question that surely you must have. The question is, of course you had to kill the adult Jews, I understand that, but how could you do the same to the women and children? So I have to tell you something: The children will be grown one day. Do we want to be so improper that we say, no, no, we're too weak to kill children. Our children can deal with them. Our children will fight that one out. But the Jewish hate, small today, will be big tomorrow, and the grown avengers will attack our children and grandchildren, who will then have to deal with them. I am convinced that this will be the case even if Adolf Hitler does not survive. No, we cannot shirk our responsibility to kill all the Jews. That would have been cowardly and therefore we adopted a clear solution to the problem, as difficult as it was. "

Hand wave it away again Dogzilla, go ahead see if it works.....