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?
Is misrepresenting other people's arguments the only way you can argue? Where did I say evidence of shooting was evidence of gassing?
I said that documented shootings corroborated evidence of gassing, even if there were no documents related to gassings. In fact, there are documents proving shootings, documents proving a policy of extermination and documents proving gassing.
But - this is the point you are missing - there need not have been; the Nazis destroyed a hell of a lot of records, and the number of sites where gassing was used was far smaller than the number of sites where shootings had taken place. It is entirely conceivable that the Nazis could have destroyed
all documents relating to gassings, leaving us with only witness testimonies. As it is, they came very close.
Since both shootings and gassings were used to carry out the policy of extermination, evidence for one increases the plausibility of the evidence for the other.
Contrary to what you seem to believe, there was nothing sacred or exalted about gassing. In Galicia, the Nazis began by shooting large numbers of Jews, first in a decimatory fashion and then escalating to large four or five figure mass killings. Then they began deporting Galician Jews to Belzec. But they also carried out shootings alongside the deportations, sometimes because the shtetl was too far from a railhead and sometimes for other reasons. Belzec was closed at the end of 1942 because its mass graves were full, but there were still about 150,000 Galician Jews left alive. So the Nazis resumed mass executions again.
Therefore, shooting and gassing were entirely interchangeable in a number of territories - whatever got the job done. If the Nazis were capable of mowing down about 200,000 Polish Jews in 1942 in the Generalgouvernement, then they were not very likely to have been merciful to the 1.27 million deported to Belzec, Sobibor or Treblinka.
They certainly weren't very likely to have 'resettled' the Jews into the east, and for this to mean they were not going to exterminate the Jews, as this would have simply deported the Jews into a wall of machine-gun fire.
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?
Nitwit, no witnesses have claimed that the Soviets used gas chambers.
Is this one of the two documents that I should have known about?
Yep.
Prior to 1939 did Sonderbehandlung mean killing? Are there documents where Sonderbehandlung did not unequivocally mean killing?
I already answered this.
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?
Since both the contemporary officials as well as 65 years' worth of historians have been able to understand the differences fairly well enough, I really don't see what your point is.
You're also ignoring the fact that the same bureaucracies also used explicit language, often interchangeably, and that there were specific institutional cultures reflecting the nature of the tasks assigned to particular administrations or units, and what their need to know was. You're also ignoring the effects of a functional division of labour.
For example, a police company might be tasked with providing an escort to a transport to Belzec. It would then be expected to write a report on the transport, which was evidently a customary practice. However, we possess very few examples of such reports - maybe 4 or 5. None of them state, 'and then we handed the Jews over to the camp staff for extermination through gas'. But there is no reason to expect that the report needed to state this, since the task of the police escort was simply to bring the Jews to the camp and hand them over, then leave.
In a report describing a transport to Belzec, the subject description was 'Jewish resettlement to Belzec'.
http://www.holocaustresearchproject.org/ar/belzec/kolomea.html
Let's parse that phrase in typical denier fashion, i.e. absolutely literally. The subject header says resettlement
to Belzec. Not
through Belzec. From the perspective of the police lieutenant who wrote the report, he did not need to spell out any further details.
The same command, Police Battalion 133, also used umgesiedelt as a euphemism for shooting.
The differences are entirely clear both to the sentient reader of posterity and to the policemen of yore.
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?
Because such correspondence was circulated between insiders.
You're describing a communication channel that could not work in any military or military like organization.
It worked perfectly fine; well enough to kill 5 million Jews and millions of non-Jews.
Militaries use codes all the time. If you don't know this, then you know nothing about any military in the 20th or 21st Centuries. Militaries and paramilitaries also euphemise excessively, which is why we are bequeathed such lovely terms as 'collateral damage' and 'terminate' to mean something other than letting someone go from their job.
In Britain, we talk about sackings to mean firings. Of course, once upon a time, sacking meant rape, pillage and indiscriminate slaughter.
Words have precise meanings.
No, they don't. Language is entirely contextual; talk to a postmodernist and they will tell you that signifier and signified are two entirely different things. The meaning of words changes over time, in a specific historical context, for any number of reasons. This is entirely obvious and irrefutable. Moreover, the meaning of words changes entirely depending on the context of a particular sentence or paragraph
The Cheka, as I pointed out before, used liquidation as a synonym and euphemism for execution. But when Stalin spoke of 'liquidating the kulaks as a class', he did not mean that all kulaks were to be executed. An OGPU command involved in dekulakisation that reported that it had deported x number of kulaks and liquidated y number was however using the term in the first sense, of execution.
Language is entirely social, and there are jargons within every language with grotesquely different meanings. If a Brit says I'm gasping for a fag, then an American might take that the wrong way.
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?
Asked and answered: it is psychologically more pleasant to speak in terms that circumlocute around unpleasantnesses. This is hardly a novelty or hardly unique to the Holocaust. There are many aspects of contemporary life where we refuse to call things by their proper name. We also euphemise death more than just about any other subject.
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?
Yes, they were explicit in public and they were explicit in private, but they also used euphemisms in private. That's the documentary track record. I have already explained why this might be so at least twice. The public statements generally came from politicians in Germany who did not have to oversee the actual task of killing. They could be far more bloodthirsty in their rhetoric because they were not confronted by what it actually mean to see thousands of corpses piled up - as Himmler put it to his Obergruppenfuehrer at Posen in 1943.
The Nazi press didn't report on resettlements or deportations. Period. German newspapers in the occupied territories were a partial exception to this rule; there were essentially no reports in the press in the Reich on what was happening to the Jews of Europe, other than the occasional baiting item about the latest antisemitic ordinance in Romania or wherever. Goebbels ordered that to avoid 'atrocity propaganda' and rumours, that the deportations from Germany and Austria not be reported in the press. Likewise, the deportations in Poland were not the subject of reports in the press in the Reich.
What filled this void was the globalised, apocalyptic hate speech of Hitler, Goebbels, Ley and other leading Nazis, which continually threatened the Jews with Ausrottung and Vernichtung, or stated that they were being subjected to it.
At least admit this much: it was pretty stupid for the Nazis to spew out so many speeches threatening or boasting about inflicting Ausrottung and Vernichtung on the Jews, given the then current dictionary translations of these words. If any regime starts babbling about extirpation and destruction of people, then I think we would have cause for concern. Don't you?
Those involved in carrying out the genocide were more prone to euphemise, for understandable psychological reasons. But enough of them also used explicit language that it would be a strawman to pretend, as you seem to want to do, that only euphemisms were used.
See: Himmler's Sonthofen speech for an example.
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?
Strawman. Actually the murderers were entirely human, and many were effectively thrust into the killing situations without choosing to become involved. SS men were transferred to Auschwitz as if it were any other posting. Not all of them were raving antisemites.
I don't avoid them. I don't find them particularly relevant.
Handwave. Either comment on the Goebbels diary entry, or leave the thread.
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.
You don't think it's clear because you don't want it to be clear. That's why you are now reduced to avoiding and handwaving the concrete examples of Nazi statements.
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.
Since there are plenty of explicit statements which you are studiously avoiding, then this is nonsense.
Understanding historically specific jargon is a requirement for a student of any period of history. In the Nazi era, during WWII but not before it, Sonderbehandlung almost always meant killing. That was just how they operated. Those who spoke of Sonderbehandlung ALSO spoke of liquidation, execution, shooting, hanging AND gassing in ways that make the term Sonderbehandlung entirely interchangeable.
They used it, moreover, in the context of reports and telexes which said: 253 Partisanen im Kampf erschossen, 100 Partisanenverdaechtige gefangengenommen und sonderbehandelt, 1000 Zivilisten evakuiert.
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.
At the end of the day, your blithe assertion that there are no mass graves is just as much of a falsehood as your pathetic attempts to explain away witness testimony and the documents.
