It most certainly doesn't rubbish my "no documents" claim. It's a document that you say was issued prior to the decision to exterminate all the Jews. You say it doesn't unambiguously state anything about a policy of intentionally exterminating all the Jews. Yet it is a document that you say is evidence for a policy that you also say hasn't been decided when the document was written.
No, I say it reflected a policy to exterminate Jews in Lithuania, unequivocally, and can be connected to other documents and actions to kill Jews throughout the East, even before the general European program was decided.
Your confusion about what you are arguing is evident. You keep changing your position - say, on Ponar. The Holocaust was not the outcome of a single decision taken before the war, for example. Nor was it a single and centralized action. Is that what you are probing for? The early mass extermination actions targeting Jews, initiated by instructions to the Einsatzgruppen and then expanded by orders from Himmler and Heydrich in the summer of 1941, occurred in the East, with victims being Jews living in the occupied East. There are documents and other evidence that show this. One such document is the Jaeger Report. Are you now trying to argue that, yes, the Jeager Report is evidence of mass murder actions, and, yes, there is good evidence therefore, along with other sources, for the mass murders at Ponar? Because you earlier called the evidence "pathetic." I think you are too confused about the course of events and actions, as well as the definition and nature of the Holocaust to put forward a coherent argument here.
I really am lost as to what you are trying to say except that you seem to have a knee-jerk negationist reflex and to deny anything up and down the line the shows National Socialist extermination actions, at any time, anywhere.
Yet, you now say you accept that the National Socialists carried out murder operations in Lithuania, the same operations that a few posts ago were judged "pathetic." The Nazis and units under their command murdered about 195,000 of Lithuania's pre-war population of 210,000 Jews (90%), most of them between June and December 1941. Cleansing? How do you define cleansing? How do you define the Holocaust?
There's no such thing as an ultra-intentionalist. The Nazis either intended to kill all the Jews they could get their hands on or they didn't. There are no degrees on intent.
Again, you are wrong, in principle, as to the history, and as to the historiography. You aren't familiar with the intentionalist/functionalist debate apparently. The intentionalists argued that the Nazis had a master plan to exterminate Europe's Jews before the war and that the plan was driven mainly from the top down - with ultra-intentionalists tracing the roots of this plan to Hitler's thinking in the 1920s. The situation is not as simple as you say: it is possible - and I think it is the case - that the intention to murder all of Europe's Jews developed over time, with input from regional activists as well as central orders.
This means that early actions that are part of the Holocaust didn't occur necessarily and always as part of central plans and surely not as part of a master plan. Large-scale, regional extermination actions in 1941 are both part of the murders defined as the Holocaust and drivers of the developing policies and actions, which coalesced into a European-wide program (with prohibition on emigration, deportations to death from countries all over Europe, and the continuation of in situ extermination actions in the East along with the operation of death centers).
That's what I do. But I don't disagree just to disagree.
No, you don't argue consistently and you don't bother to check your assumptions about what others are arguing.
You are straw-manning the current scholarship - and making assumptions about my position. I said that there are documents showing decisions to make whole regions free of Jews - and you still say "no documents" because now you add in gas chambers (Wroclaw has already corrected you on this) and so on.
When I said pathetic, I meant that nominating Pesye Schloss as a credible Jewish eyewitness to the holocaust. What is pathetic is that your team considers this person's testimony to be at least as good as any other testimony by a witness to the holocaust. If all the other eyewitnesses are individuals who appear only in one other person's diary and their testimony is primarily the diarists summary of their testimony then all the other eyewitnesses are equally pathetic.
Well, that isn't what you wrote. Further, your position is very weak. Here's why: Schloss, Trojak, and Katz are all summarized (I tell you for the umpteenth time) along with unnamed witnesses by a reliable observer. But the corroborating sources - I won't type them all out again but just mention a Polish eyewitness (Sakowicz) and Jeager (an official German report) - are not "individuals who appear only in one other person's diary." As Nick Terry has said, as well, when we have Trojak appearing in another diary and Katz, a well known educator, speaking at an underground meeting about her escape - it supports not only their credibility but the value of Kruk's summaries. But let's go back for a minute to what you wrote: You wrote that
It wasn't until the Pesye Schloss discussion that I realized how pathetic the documentation might be for the holocaust by bullets part of the holocaust.
You didn't simply dismiss Schloss. You dismissed everything in Kruk, all other sources (including other Jewish diaries) mentioned in this thread, trial testimony and court decisions, Jaeger's report, and the Polish eyewitness Sakowicz. Without ever reading any of them. This is why I say you are inconsistent - you jump all around, denying this and that, without trying to put together a coherent accounting for the evidence we do have and how it fits in. And you do this without even bothering to read the evidence. And you lie: you did not write that Pesye Schloss's testimony was "pathetic" but that the "the documentation . . . for the holocaust by bullets part of the holocaust" was shown to be "pathetic" during discussion of Ponar, which you insist on reducing to one witness, Pesye Schloss. As I have said all along, Pesye Schloss gave credible testimony recorded by Kruk, but you can choose to ignore it, and you still have documentation for the Holocaust by bullets at Ponar that is far from "pathetic" and which you are dancing all around.
