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.
There is documentary evidence of shooting. There is evidence that shooting was part of state policy. I have never denied that. Will some of the lurkers help Nick out here? Explain how evidence of shooting is evidence of gassings?
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.
So they did it because they could have done it? You need to stop conflating evidence of something with evidence of gassings. We know the Soviets were quite capable of shooting masses of people. How is that not evidence of Soviet gas chambers?
Nobody said they were.
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.
Is this one of the two documents that I should have known about?
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.
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.
Prior to 1939 did Sonderbehandlung mean killing? Are there documents where Sonderbehandlung did not unequivocally mean killing?
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.
So how was one suppose to know what the true meaning of a word that was used euphemistically? Did everybody know that certain words might be euphemisms and that the real meaning of the word needed to be determined by the context? Do we know of any situations where a euphemism was misunderstood and the incorrect action was taken?
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.
If the Nazis had used pig Latin instead of developing enigma, this might be believable. The Nazis clearly marked words that were euphemisms? How was the reader to know what the real meaning of the word was?
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.
You're describing a communication channel that could not work in any military or military like organization. Words have precise meanings. Everybody needs to know what those precise meanings are. If Batman were explaining to Robin that he had intercepted a communique between the Riddler and the Joker and pointed to certain words set off by single quotes as words that have a secret meaning, it would typical Batman camp. But in Nazi Germany?
If this euphemistic language was so obvious, why did they even bother with it?
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.
They were explicit in public but used euphemism in private? Would you expect there to be press reports about deportations of Jews? Were all resettlements mentioned in the press?
And what pop-psychology guru did you learn about mass murderers using euphemisms to make killing easier? I thought the Nazis were evil bastards down to their core. Are you now saying that they were human and had human emotions?
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.
I don't avoid them. I don't find them particularly relevant. I don't dispute that the Nazis were bad people who hated the Jews. I don't think it's clear that there was a policy to exterminate all the Jews and more and more quotes from Nazis that sound bad do not an extermination policy make.
I think the euphemism theory of communication if it were advanced in any other context would be seen for what it is: a silly conspiracy theory.
But at the end of the day, what the Nazis said explicitly or non explicitly doesn't matter. As long as there are no mass graves at the death camps that can hold all the bodies, all those people weren't killed there. Period.
