This experiment falls apart in the context of anti-partisan reprisals and the fact that Jews were enemies of the state. One could argue that anti-partisan reprisals were excessive, particularly shooting women and children. But partisan activity was a significant threat in the occupied territories and the partisans didn't adhere to any established rules of combat, including the use of women and children.
No, the argument does not fall apart because of antipartisan reprisals. There is a massive paper trail relating to German security operations in the east, and it shows that the SS and Police units carrying out mass shootings only sometimes used the excuse of a supposed Jew/partisan link, which meant that the SS and Police went into already closed ghettos to wipe out entire communities based on an ideological fantasy.
There is no reference to partisan activity here, in EK 2's comment of February 1942:
Das Ziel, das dem EK 2 von Anfang an vorschwebte, war eine radikale Loesung des Judenproblems durch die Exekution aller Juden.
Nor is there any reference to partisan activity by Jews in the Jaeger report, or indeed in the Stahlecker reports produced by the commander of Einsatzgruppe A, which supervised EKs 2 and 3. Einsatzgruppen B and D listed "Jews" and "partisans" separately when reporting their bodycounts.
Look at your argument this way:
Hypothesis: Americans had a policy of exterminating Japanese civilians
Results of 'experiment' #1: there is copious documentary evidence of incendiary bombing raids which intentionally created firestorms killing Japanese civilians into six figures.
Results of 'experiment' #1a: there is copious evidence that the United States expended considerable resources to create an advanced weapon system that would create firestorms on an unprecedented scale.
Results of 'experiment' #2: there is copious witness evidence of incindiary bombing raids which created firestorms killing Japanese civilians into six figures
Results of 'experiment' #2a: there is copious evidence that the United States expended considerable resources to create an advanced weapon system that would create firestorms on an unprecedented scale.
Initial conclusion: the firebombing of Japanese civilians confirm a policy of extermination into seven figures
Results of 'experiment' #3: there is copious witness and documentary evidence of gas chamber executions in the United States.
It doesn't make sense.
Only because you are comparing apples and oranges.
Strategic bombing in WWII, including the use of nuclear weapons, killed around 2.6 million people across all theatres of war. This is the estimate given me by Professor Richard Overy, who is coordinating a research project on bombing in WWII at the moment. Between 400,000 and 500,000 Japanese civilians were killed by US bombing, including the 210,000 victims of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the 100,000 victims of the firestorm in Tokyo. That was 0.7% of the total Japanese population at the time. Around 400,000 German civilians within the 1937 borders died due to Allied bombing, that is about 0.6% of the total population of Germany.
While you will certainly find evidence that the Americans were extremely racist to the Japanese in WWII and waged warfare in a far from restrained manner, a kill rate of 0.7% does not indicate that this attitude translated into a deliberate policy of attempting to actually exterminate all Japanese.
By contrast, the Nazis exterminated about 94% of the unexempted Jews they could lay their hands on. 5 million killed by the Nazis, only 300,000 preserved for labour who survived the war.
Even if we exclude deaths from starvation and only include deaths from gassing and shooting, then the kill ratio is still about 80%.
Moreover, and this is the naughtiest slide you make, evidence that the US carried out some legal executions under due process using gas chambers of convicts on their own territory, would not be evidence that there was an extralegal policy of extermination by gas on foreign soil.
The Nazis didn't use gas for their court ordered executions. They used gas on German soil to kill psychiatric patients in the euthanasia program. Personnel from the euthanasia program were transferred to Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka. We are more than entitled to draw the inference from this easily documentable fact that the same killing method was used in BST as in the euthanasia institutes, especially when combined with all of the other evidence.
The Nazis also used gas to kill Polish psychiatric patients outside Germany. The personnel involved belonged to Sonderkommando Lange, which was then tasked with setting up the extermination camp of Chelmno.
OK, I can see your point. But the evidence of shootings is weak evidence of extermination because there are other explanations for the shootings.
Nope. Let's quote EK 2 again
Das Ziel, das dem EK 2 von Anfang an vorschwebte, war eine radikale Loesung des Judenproblems durch die Exekution aller Juden.
This is hardly the only such statement from 'ground level' regarding extermination which we know to have been carried out by shooting, quite aside from the 'higher level' statements about extermination which would pertain to both shootings and gassings.
And quite aside from the evidence that the Nazis executed well over 90% of the Jews who were caught behind the frontlines in the Soviet Union.
Except there are not documents proving gassings at Auschwitz.
Yes, there are. And there are other documents which Pressac did not use or know about.
There are many eyewitnesses to gassings at Auschwitz although not as many as most people presume and some of them are so unreliable or farfetched that nothing they say can be believed.
Actually the entire inmate population of Birkenau in 1943-44, as well as prisoners who could watch from the vantage point of the upper floors of the factories to the east of Birkenau and west of the main camp, are probative witnesses to mass murder. This would amount to up to 100,000 people who survived the camp and the war.
Roman Rosdolsky, a noted Ukrainian emigre Marxist intellectual, wrote the following in 1956:
http://www.workersliberty.org/node/6884
For the whole of two years, 1943 and 1944, transports would arrive at Birkenau with thousands of Jews from Poland, Slovakia, Bohemia, Norway, the Netherlands, Belgium, France, and Greece. Only a small portion of them — specialists of all sorts — were chosen to work in our camp and Birkenau. The rest, and all women and children, were immediately dispatched to the gas. It was such an everyday occurrence and we grew so accustomed to it that we began to note as extraordinary those days when there were no Jewish transports and no flames shot up from the chimneys of the crematoria.
The reader will ask how I know all this. Unfortunately, not just from conversations with other prisoners in Auschwitz and Birkenau; I was forced to witness it. From spring 1943 until autumn 1944 I worked as a carpenter on the second floor of a huge factory, Deutsche Ausrustungswerke, which stood halfway between the main camp and Birkenau. The large factory windows looked out over Birkenau. From them we saw, maybe a hundred paces from us, the end of the railroad tracks leading to Birkenau as well as, and above all, the chimneys of the crematoria. We could have no doubt about what went on beyond the gates of Birkenau’s hell.
and further
There’s no point in going into all we experienced and how we grew old inside during that year and a half. I’ll just describe the most terrible period, the so-called “Hungarian action” of the summer of 1944.
Beginning 4 May of that year, and day in, day out thereafter, four or five long trainloads of Hungarian Jews would pull into the tracks before our windows. They were unloaded in a hurry, and any bundles anyone had were taken away. Then SS-men came and divided the new arrivals into two groups, separating the men from the women and children. They chased them all off to the “showers,” that is, to the gas chambers. Immediately afterwards a special work team went through the bundles, removing food and clothing and searching for money and gold. The barracks of this work team were separated from our factory only by a wooden fence. The team was made up of several dozen young women prisoners, each wearing a red kerchief on her head. They were allowed to eat whatever perishable food they found in the bundles. This dreadful work team was generally referred to as “Canada.”
By the first week of May “Canada’s” yard was already piled high with bundles. We were always tormented by hunger, and the bolder prisoners among us began to steal these bundles from behind the fence. At the same time the smoke began to billow from all six crematoria. And this was not all. Just next to Birkenau, to the right of us, lay a birch forest (hence the name Brzezinki/Birkenau). A huge fire began to blaze in the woods, the flames alternating with thick, yellowish-grey smoke. A few days later we found out what was happening: the crematoria were unable to handle thousands of corpses, so a deep pit was dug in the Birkenau woods to burn the unfortunate victims. Some time at the end of May our factory received an order to supply Birkenau with a dozen or so iron-tipped hooks four meters long. At the head of the order, which I read with my own eyes, it said: Ungarische Aktion.
A quibbler might nitpick that Rosdolsky speaks of six crematoria and not four. But Kremas IV and V had two chimneys each, making a total of six chimneys; Rosdolsky does not claim in this testimony to have set foot in Birkenau, only that he could observe Birkenau from the DAW factory. The error in fact confirms the honesty of his testimony. He
His workshop did indeed receive work-orders of the kind he described in the spring of 1944.
When you are arguing against extermination at Auschwitz, you are arguing against many thousands of witnesses such as Rosdolsky who were there, whereas you and I were not.
There are many hundreds more direct witnesses who saw gas chambers first-hand, or could observe the process more closely from whatever vantage point, these including for example members of the Kanadakommando who could see gas being thrown into Kremas IV and V from their work-places, as well as the SS, Sonderkommando survivors and other witnesses who saw inside the buildings.
More, in fact, than
you may think.
And you would actually expect more documents for gassings than you would for shootings because shooting requires no skills or equipment that an ordinary soldier doesn't already have.
Gassing also requires no skills or equipment not possessed by medical orderlies, who routinely used Zyklon B to disinfect barracks with nothing more than gas masks and loose sealants for the windows and doors.
There were only 8 camps where gassing was used on a large scale for the purpose of exterminating Jews: in order of lethality
from gassing these are Auschwitz, Treblinka, Belzec, Sobibor, Chelmno, Maly Trostinets, Majdanek and Semlin.
By contrast, there were 4 Einsatzgruppen, 16 Sonder-and Einsatzkommandos, another 10 Kommandeure der Sicherheitspolizei, 10 Kommandeure der Ordnungspolizei, around 50 police battalions, 2 Waffen-SS brigades, at least 12 SSPF commands,3 HSSPFs, and several other units who were directly involved in mass shootings of Jews on a comparable scale, just in the occupied eastern territories. Which comes to more than 100 different units, as a minimum, versus 8.
In neither case do we have intact records.
The fact that the shootings took place at many sites means there are potentially more eyewitnesses.
Correct.
It also is easier to hide many small mass graves rather than one big one.
Incorrect. It is never difficult to locate a mass killing site because there will always be some witnesses who know where the victim were taken. It is however an impossibility to erase the traces of many hundreds of mass graves dispersed across a vast area like the occupied Ukraine. The most one can achieve is attempting to erase the largest graves at a few sites. Which is precisely what the Nazis tried to do. Even these attempts failed, because the grave areas could be identified.
But if we say that gassing and shooting are two sides to the same extermination policy and we have copious documentation proving shooting, it follows that we would have a similar amount of documentation proving gassings.
No, it doesn't follow in the slightest. If there are 100 units carrying out shootings and only 8 units carrying out gassings in camps, then if the records of both sets of units are incomplete because of the burning of records, we expect to find fewer documents relating to gassing. Which is what we in fact find.
We should have at least reports showing that X number of Jews were gassed on such and such a day like we do for reports of Einsatzgruppen activity.
Why should we? Most of the
ordinary records for Auschwitz are manifestly lost.
Plus, gas chambers on the scale of the Nazi gas chambers would generate huge amounts of peripheral documents--design specifications, work orders, instruction manuals, memorandums of understanding, etc. None of these seem to have survived.
Again, this reckons without the Auschwitz paper trail which provides just such evidence. Likewise, without the paper trail for gas vans used at 3 of the 8 extermination sites.
There is no reason to expect that any documents relating to the design or construction of the gas chambers at Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka would have survived, because they were not constructed by contractors. There are precisely zero surviving files from these camps themselves, only a number of documents in the files of agencies which they had to deal with. If as the witnesses state, the gas chambers were constructed in-house, then there is no reason to expect the slightest documentary trace to have survived.
And the "the Nazis burned all the files" isn't an explanation.
Yes, it is an explanation of why not as much
documentary evidence might survive.
You can't say we don't have evidence of a crime because the criminals destroyed all the evidence. If the criminals really destroyed the evidence of their crime then they got away with it
Hey folks, watch what Dogzilla has done here. He has slid from
documentary evidence to
all evidence. Criminals don't generally write down details of their crimes. They tend to be caught and convicted on the basis of witness evidence and circumstantial evidence, i.e. forensics.
Evidently, the Nazis did not succeed as some modern gangs have, in bumping off all incriminating witnesses to their crimes. Nor did they succeed in erasing all traces of their killing sites.
Blowing up the crematoria at Auschwitz did not stop postwar investigators, including deniers, from repeatedly finding cyanide in the ruins. That is standard criminalistics, and it was done in 1945, and repeated in the 1980s and 1990s.
Nor did the Nazis succeed, despite obvious efforts to do so, in burning
all documents relating to the camps or to the gassings.
