Merged General Holocaust denial discussion thread

[Dogzilla]

I see you have no idea what Dawidowicz was referring to there when she mentioned the 1959 Soviet Census.

She was talking about Jewish losses. Do you even know who she is?

 

[Dogzilla]

But I have thought long and hard about these issues, and, as Nick says, I do know. I know how Jew was defined, for example, in Germany, Poland, Hungary, and the parts of the Soviet Union occupied by the Germans, because I've read that Hilberg book you go on about but the contents of which you seem to be ignorant. For just this once I will resist temptation and I will not type out a long summary for you.

How many times have we seen this type of dodge? You don't have the answer so you say you do but you're not going to tell us. It's old but it's all you got.

After Nick's neat dissection of your sophistry, there is not much to add.

But let's keep trying to get you to make some sort of relevant argument - instead of waving distractions and fluff around to cover your dodging.

Warsaw. I am a bit tired of your failing to have a clue about Vilna, so let's try Warsaw, and add that city to Vilna and now Kiev, the situation of which Nick just outlined for you, as cities you dodge discussing.

If you want a definition of "Jews" for Warsaw, one way to look at this non-problem is simple, namely, that the Nuremberg definition was operative in the General-Gouvernement, following some false starts, as of July 1940.

Another way to think about this is even simpler: the Germans had the police power to enforce their definition of Jew in the G-G and did so in different ways. One way was to establish what we commonly call the Warsaw ghetto in fall 1940. The Germans often called this area, into which certain people were forced, by German coercive power, to live, the Jewish Residential District. We know, therefore, how the Germans viewed the people living in Warsaw ghetto.

By combining these two views, and understanding Nazi power in the territories Germany occupied, I also know, as do you, despite your childish flapping around, within an acceptable margin of error, how many people, defined as Jews by the Nazis, lived in the Jewish Residential District of Warsaw. Or you could engage in more sophistry and point to a few anomalous individuals and declare therefore that you have no idea how many Jews lived in the Jewish Residential District of Warsaw, hoping no one will notice your desperation and inability to tackle the problem you yourself raised in announcing that the Nazi policy was removal of Jews from Europe rather than extermination.

(We can, of course, discuss, in a similar vein, the Jewish residents of the other locations we've discussed the past few days - Germany and the 4 cities besides Warsaw. It was these people, defined and treated as Jews, about whom we have been talking. For the reasons and with the results that Nick explained in his post. There is no meaningful confusion about the people we are discussing in these places. Enough. Your obfuscation is obvious, as is your failure to offer any explanation for the drastic reductions in the Jewish populations in these places.)

So back to the Jewish Residential District in Warsaw, since you won't discuss what happened to the 60,000 or so Jews of Vilna. By the Nuremberg definition operative in the G-G, the Nazis forced Jews to live in Warsaw ghetto, about 450,000 Jews living there when the ghetto was formed. You say these people were subsequently resettled. Tell us where to, when, how, and in what number. Simple. No more fluff about European demography or embarrassing attempts to obfuscate by asking for well-known information. Just a simple reply to what happened to the 450,000 people living in the Jewish Residential District in 1940.

You are failing miserably. Your attempts to distract are patently obvious tactics you hope will allow you to escape giving an answer to straightforward questions, ones that follow logically from your own posts. Readers here recall that you tried the same tactics with the Jaeger Report. The question for denial, which you have raised, is whether it has any case at all to make. It appears not.

By the way, if you would like to know what Himmler would have done with your definitional niceties, he would have told you that the SS was about getting on with getting rid of Jews, and were not to be slowed down by metaphysical disputes, as he wrote in July 1942 to Gottlob Berger about the re-writing of the Nuremberg definitions by the Ministry for Eastern Occupied Territories, "I request urgently that no ordinance be issued about the concept of 'Jew.' With all these foolish definitions we are only tying our hands. The occupied eastern territories will be cleared of Jews. The implementation of this very hard order has been placed on my shoulders by the Führer. No one can release me from this responsibility in any case. I forbid all interference."

Please get on with discussing what happened to the Jews incarcerated in Warsaw's Jewish Residential District under German control. Or Vilna's Jews. Or the Jews in Lodz. And so on.

You can continue playing the where did they go game like a puppy chasing his tail. I told you that I don't know. I told you that I don't care. I don't care because it doesn't matter to me where they went. You on the other hand say that you do know. You know that millions of them were deported to death camps and murdered in gas chambers. IF that happened, there would be evidence of this at those death camps. There isn't any evidence of that happening. So we know that your answer is wrong. You can't run from that fact.

If you're missing a bunch of Jews, then they're missing. You have the germ of a good idea in considering how many Jews there were in various parts of Europe like Warsaw or Lodz. But that's not the way the holocaust death toll is calculated. It's how it should be but it isn't. We have learned here from Team holocaust that the reduction of death tolls at individual camps doesn't effect the total number of Jews murdered. Similarly, finding a number of Jews who survived the Warsaw ghetto wouldn't change the overall number of Jews who survived or were murdered. So what's the point? If you want to know what happened to the Jews in, for example, Warsaw, go to Israel or NYC or LA or Miami and start looking. Do you really think you won't find any?

You're playing a smoke and mirrors game that doesn't fool anybody. If you really care about finding missing Jews, go dig at Auschwitz, Treblinka, Sobibor, or Belzec. If you don't find them there, then you need to figure out where else you can look. I don't care.

 

[Corsair 115]

I'd just like to jump in and say this thread just isn't the same without Saggy chiming in every few pages about his belief in the vast worldwide Jewish conspiracy which controls the media, academia, and everything else. That, at least, provided a certain amount of (admittedly sad) entertainment value.

Dogzilla and Clayton Moore need to step up their game to take over Saggy's place.

 

[LemmyCaution]

How many times have we seen this type of dodge? You don't have the answer so you say you do but you're not going to tell us. It's old but it's all you got.

Actually, I bothered to give you the answer for the General-Gouvernement, if you'd paid attention, and touched on it for the Soviet Union.

But there's more. I have answered, often at great length, every clueless question and juvenile comment from you and other deniers. Often without getting a reply in return. When I do get a reply, it is, I hate to say it, a false claim, strawmanning, or arm flapping. So in this case, a rather broad request, touching on many countries and situations, I stated exactly how I felt after a long day at work, having arrived home at 8 or so. I wasn't going to type out a long summary for an issue that is beside the point to the topic of discussion.

And then I threw in the G-G and (sort of) the USSR anyway. And you didn't even notice.

Grow up.

You can continue playing the where did they go game like a puppy chasing his tail. I told you that I don't know. I told you that I don't care. I don't care because it doesn't matter to me where they went.

Which position, I told you, is fatal for denial. As did Wroclaw. Absolutely fatal. You claim that the core of the Nazi program was removing Jews from Europe. And then you prove unable to explain where to, how, and how you know.

Instead of giving your case, you write post after post quibbling about side issues, tangents, and non-issues.

And you don't notice your predicament. Amazing.

You on the other hand say that you do know. You know that millions of them were deported to death camps and murdered in gas chambers. IF that happened, there would be evidence of this at those death camps. There isn't any evidence of that happening. So we know that your answer is wrong. You can't run from that fact.

That is not my argument, so once again you strawman.

To begin with, my argument is that about half those who were murdered were killed in the east in open-air shootings. We started with that part of the Holocaust - and, in fact, I produced a great deal of evidence for some of the open air shootings and so has Nick The discussion went dead when you failed to deal with one specific piece of that evidence, the first piece you tried to tackle in any serious manner, the Jaeger Report.

As to the death camps, others in this thread have posted a great deal of evidence, which you treat similarly to the evidence for open-air killings. But we weren't discussing the death camps - we were discussing open-air shootings and removal of the Jews from Europe.

Further, as Wroclaw said, this particular dialogue isn't about my claims or my evidence. You made some claims (your specific interpretation of the Jaeger Report; your broad assertion that Nazis had a policy of removing Jews from Europe, not taking their lives). It doesn't matter what my position is since we are now discussing your claims. Claims about the core of what the Nazis believed about and did with Jews in Europe.

I asked you to support your claims. You refused. It's really that simple.

That is denial's brilliant success: "I don't know, I don't care." I am fine with where you have yourself.

If you're missing a bunch of Jews, then they're missing.

II am not "missing a bunch of Jews." I know the fate, broadly speaking, of the people we’re discussing. But for you to put matters that way shows that you aren't serious and don't know what you are talking about. It's flippant and it's dumb and it's insulting.

100s of 1000s of Jews - nearly a million - just from specific locations I named - were demonstrably in the locations mentioned at the onset of the war and demonstrably not there after the war. All your waffle and side-stepping and sophistry is designed to take attention of the simple question I asked you: If the Nazis implemented a policy of relocating these people out of Europe, how did they do it, where did the people get sent to, and how do you know.

Easy.

Taking one case, Vilna, any reader of this thread will know - perhaps to the point of excruciating boredom, I am not sure - that I can and will provide great detail on the fate of Jews living in this city, as I understand their fate. Any reader will know that I base my understanding on multiple sources, because I cite them and say what they say. Any reader will know that I am familiar with the literature and try being careful with the sources and honest with what is in them.

On the other hand, with Vilna, any reader can see that you are all over the map - but mostly dodging. At times you are myopic, focusing on a single detail you don't comprehend. You latch onto dishonest claims a former member of this forum tried advancing. You are clueless about the context for the evidence, and your posts read as though you are making things up as you go along. You claim not to know or care, but, strangely, you argue against the obvious conclusions of all the evidence and insist on denying the murders. You ignore most of the evidence - specific, named sources. When you finally talk about the Jaeger Report, you make three bold but unfounded claims, then clam up when asked to support them.

The contrast in how you and I approach a significant part of the Holocaust could not be starker. The same is true between you and others posting in this thread about other elements of the Holocaust. We all see you jumping around, dodging, making empty claims you can't back up, contradicting yourself, etc.

As I noted before, if this is how denial intends to convince people, the whole project is in its waning days. You have nothing, basically, and you admit it, more or less, only to repeat your position anyway and run from its implications.

You have the germ of a good idea in considering how many Jews there were in various parts of Europe like Warsaw or Lodz. But that's not the way the holocaust death toll is calculated.

IHow the European-wide death toll of Jews is calculated doesn't matter because we weren't talking about how that death toll is calculated.

You are trying to escape an uncomfortable position you've gotten yourself into by pretending we were discussing something that you want to post denier copy-paste about. But we were talking about something different, and your standard denier silliness won't help you out with it. Our topic has been the Nazi policy of resettling Jews to remove them from Europe. That is the context in which I asked you about five cities. Not to calculate a continent-wide death toll. And that is what you have tried everything you can think of to evade - you simply won't discuss a specific case, not the Jaeger Report, not the five specific cities (or even one city) - to demonstrate your claim, that the Nazis resettled these specific Jews to somewhere out of Europe.

If you won't defend your claim, I don't see why anyone should believe it.

You should give it up. You have stopped making sense as you have stopped even following the discussion your own post initiated.

We have learned here from Team holocaust that the reduction of death tolls at individual camps doesn't effect the total number of Jews murdered.

Again, there is no Team Holocaust, and you and I were not discussing this question. I am happy to discuss it - and, no, please don't try claiming that this some "type of dodge," because if I have shown you anything, it is patience and a willingness to go into great detail - but I will discuss your new topic, the overall Holocaust death toll, only after you first deal with unaddressed topics - the Jaeger Report, on the one hand, and the five cities, as examples of resettlement, on the other.

Similarly, finding a number of Jews who survived the Warsaw ghetto wouldn't change the overall number of Jews who survived or were murdered. So what's the point?

The point is simple. Whether Warsaw's Jews were resettled out of Europe, or murdered, they went somewhere. You claimed that the Nazis implemented a policy of removing Jews from Europe. Warsaw is a case of this, it would seem. Actually, you can read a number of books by historians that state roughly what happened to Warsaw's Jews - including those Jews who were not deported from the ghetto but went into hiding, fled, etc. and managed to survive the Holocaust. Some of the books you can read about this were, in fact, written by such survivors.

By the way, accounting for events, like what happened to Warsaw's Jews, is what historians do - including revisionist historians.

You, on the other hand, refuse to lay out any case at all with regard to Warsaw's Jews. Or those who lived in Vilna, Lodz, Riga, or Kiev. You spend your time and energy whining that the obligation is unfair and trying to wriggle out of it. That is why you are not a revisionist. You are a denier. You have bupkis or you would have presented a case. Simple.

If you want to know what happened to the Jews in, for example, Warsaw, go to Israel or NYC or LA or Miami and start looking. Do you really think you won't find any?

This is one of the more bereft answers you have given. You tell me - and how many and where the rest went.

You're playing a smoke and mirrors game that doesn't fool anybody. If you really care about finding missing Jews, go dig at Auschwitz, Treblinka, Sobibor, or Belzec. If you don't find them there, then you need to figure out where else you can look. I don't care.

What I care about is an entirely different matter to what we are discussing. You claimed the Nazis removed the Jews from Europe and resettled them. Instead of telling us where and how, you now pretend that I am trying to find "missing" Jews?

This is your considered, serious response to the questions you raised - to where did the Nazis resettle Jews, how did the resettlement work, what sources support the resettlement?

Smoke and mirrors? LOL. The longer you dodge giving an explanation of your own claims, the more you hurt your cause - and your own credibility. It's all good.

 

[LemmyCaution]

OK. So let me get this straight. You can strip Jews of their citizenship, force them out of just about every profession, restrict where they can live, where they can work, where they play, turn a blind eye to private citizens beating them up and smashing and looting their property and they won't dislike it?

Do you not understand the difference between the word dislike and the word sabotage, especially when applied broadly to an entire group of people, to nearly all of whom the word sabotage doesn't remotely apply? Your trope here is deeply antisemitic.

 

[LemmyCaution]

(Just between you and me, I was only kidding. My point was that Germans using the word exterminate when talking about the Jews isn't evidence of an extermination policy any more than Americans using the word exterminate when talking about the Japanese meant that the US had a policy of exterminating the Japanese. But Team holocaust is kinda dim so I guess they took it the wrong way. Keep it hush hush and on the QT. I want to see how long it is before they figure it out.)

Your point was obvious, but it didn't work. You simply forgot a) most of the statements you quoted targeted specific combatants and b) unsaid was some of what happened in the Pacific (Like the firebombing of Tokyo and Hiroshima/Nagasaki) - all of which ended up making you look foolish as your point exploded in your face.

 

[LemmyCaution]

Given Joachim Neander's defense of Irene Zisblatt, I think I'll stick to what the conventional sources like USHMM or the Jewish Virtual library say about the Reich Citizenship laws of 1935. Good to see you still know how to pick cherries.

Not true. I disagree with Joachim on a lot. To accept points he argues convincingly isn't cherrypicking - it's reading and thinking critically. On this question, as on many others, Joachim made a strong case, which I thought I'd share. And he went into more detail than either site you mention. IIRC in fact his post was a reply to my statement, on Jews having been stripped of their citizenship, which he corrected with a sourced, well argued discussion.

Disregard Joachim's argument if you like, but don't think that by showing the very types of sources he's quarreling with you've proven anything.

 

[A'isha]

She was talking about Jewish losses. Do you even know who she is?

I know very well who she is.

I also know what she was referring to when she mentioned the 1959 Soviet census - what it says, how it is and has been used to investigate death tolls, and the context of both the census itself and the historical information derived from it.

You, on the other hand, know as little about it as Clayton Moore knew about what Wiesel wrote in his book.

 

[Think_Tank]

The Germans were fighting a ruthless partisan war against an enemy that used women and children as combatants and as human shields. When the enemy uses women and children as soldiers, your soldiers need to kill them.

Leaving aside that you have offered no source for this, the French Resistance were fighting such a partisan war. Although there were brutal reprisals, there was no campaign of genocide against the French that I am aware of.

I told you that I don't know. I told you that I don't care. I don't care because it doesn't matter to me where they went.

You should. You really should. Because without this information, there isn't so much a hole in your story as a mile-deep chasm.

If you want to be considered the "revisionist" you seem to want to be, provide an alternative theory and back it up with evidence. But you've been asked before, and I for one am not going to hold my breath.

Edit: Lemmy's post in 9224 sums this up far more eloquently.

 

[Wroclaw]

Citing the circumstances of the Frank family as typical of the remaining 2 to 3,999,990 is beyond hope.

You're correct. To do that would be ridiculous.

Instead, I will maintain that the Frank family's experience is downright typical of non-citizen Jews in the Netherlands during WWII. With two notable exceptions: (1) Most Jews in the Netherlands were not hidden by Gentiles; and (2) Most Dutch Jews died if they were deported; Anne Frank's father survived, although she and her sister Margo died.

 

[Wroclaw]

Given Joachim Neander's defense of Irene Zisblatt, I think I'll stick to what the conventional sources like USHMM or the Jewish Virtual library say about the Reich Citizenship laws of 1935. Good to see you still know how to pick cherries.

Defense? Can you actually read or do you dictate your posts to an assistant?

 

[LemmyCaution]

Defense? Can you actually read or do you dictate your posts to an assistant?

Good point! There was so much waffle and arm-waving from Dogzilla by morning that I missed that word. What a travesty. He can't get anything right - and he doesn't seem to want to discuss any of the actual history.

 

[TheRedWorm]

Good point! There was so much waffle and arm-waving from Dogzilla by morning that I missed that word. What a travesty. He can't get anything right - and he doesn't seem to want to discuss any of the actual history.

Most HDs can't. If they discussed actual history as it happened in a little place I like to call reality, they wouldn't be HDs.

 

[Dogzilla]

What I care about is an entirely different matter to what we are discussing. You claimed the Nazis removed the Jews from Europe and resettled them. Instead of telling us where and how, you now pretend that I am trying to find "missing" Jews?

One of the reasons you continue to fail miserably is your inability to listen and understand what people say. What did you say that would lead me to believe you are trying to find missing Jews? I know you're not looking for them. I know where you think they are. You think their mortal remains are under the ground in a thousand anonymous mass graves or are being trampled by tourists walking amongst the stone monuments at few former "death" camps. You haven't looked for them there or if you have you haven't found them but lack of evidence has never stopped you from believing.

So I know you're not looking for them. Since you care enough about them to tell me I need to find them, you should be looking for them. But I know you're not.

This is your considered, serious response to the questions you raised - to where did the Nazis resettle Jews, how did the resettlement work, what sources support the resettlement?

One of the reasons you continue to fail miserably is your inability to listen and understand what people say. I didn't say the Nazis resettled the Jews. I said they wanted them out of Europe. It started with the joint effort between the Nazis and Zionist leaders to develop Palestine shortly after Hitler took power in 1933. It continued throughout the early years with various actions and legislation hoping to make the Jews emigrate. When the war started emigration became impossible so the Jews were deported to various ghettos and concentration camps. If Germany had won the war, "resettling" the Jews would have been possible. But Germany didn't so it wasn't.

I assume you're familiar enough with the evidence that Jews were deported to not need to go over that. This is pretty basic material. For you to not get it is something of a fail.

 

[Moss]

Sometimes I do wonder why the Dead Nazi PR Machine fails to investigate where those Jews allegedly went. Shouldn't it be like some holy grail for them if they were to prove that all those ended up somewhere alive and reasonably well?
Instead of trying to quibble every detail to death (which they actually fail to accomplish as can be seen here) they would have positive evidence for their alternative narrative.
The same goes for holocaust denial literature. Few of it does original research and instead either reiterates the same few talking points or is entirely dependent on the work of historians. To me it seems denier scholarship shines with its total absence.

 

[Nick Terry]

Decimated? Everybody seems to have fallen into the trap of agreeing that when US politicians and military leaders talked about exterminating the Japanese they were talking about literally exterminating the Japanese. (Just between you and me, I was only kidding. My point was that Germans using the word exterminate when talking about the Jews isn't evidence of an extermination policy any more than Americans using the word exterminate when talking about the Japanese meant that the US had a policy of exterminating the Japanese. But Team holocaust is kinda dim so I guess they took it the wrong way. Keep it hush hush and on the QT. I want to see how long it is before they figure it out.)

Once a week? Wow! It should be easy for you to find a few of those quotes then. Don't bother though. If I bothered to critique every comment by a Nazi politician talking about exterminating the Jews, you would be obligated to critique every comment made by an American politician about exterminating the Japanese and explain why he wasn't really talking about exterminating. It'd be especially tough for you because you've already acknowledged that the exterminationist rhetoric from US politicians and military officers about the Japanese wasn't bluster because the United States was literally exterminating the Japanese.

So we'll just agree that Nazi Germany and the United States both planned to literally exterminate entire ethnic/racial groups. Both countries rounded up their ethnic/racial enemies, put them into concentration camps and used language like "evacuation to the East" as a code for killing.

It's good that you conceded this point. Even if you could hand wave away every comment made by an American about exterminating the Japanese, I have my ace in the hole. I can show you a picture of an intact working gas chamber that actually murdered human beings in California and Oregon.

Or you could stop making idiotic challenges like explain every comment conventionally understood to mean extermination of the Jews made by German politicians and published in history books.

Unfortunately, my remark wasn't a 'challenge' but a simple statement of how the world works. You can try to spin one or two statements referring to extermination, but such an approach will always fail when there is a larger number. This is the principle of total evidence. It isn't unique to this discussion, it's just that deniers violate it more frequently than normal people.

I'm quite sure that LemmyCaution and several others in this thread know exactly the kind of statements to which I was referring. They are the same statements that have been discussed in countless works since the 1940s. Hans Frank speaking to his cabinet on December 16, 1941, for example.

You seem a bit confused about what policy is. Policy refers to state practices decided upon by politicians and/or civil servants. The Nazis are deemed to have had a policy of extermination because the top politicians and the civil servants and other agents of the Nazi state not only kept on talking about it, but actually implemented it, as is demonstrated by numerous documents reporting on the mass killing and even mass gassing of Jews from 1941 onwards.

Thus, when an RSHA official (a civil servant) reported that 97,000 had been processed in gas vans which were clearly stationed at Chelmno, he was discussing the policy of extermination of Jews as implemented in the Warthegau.

When Hitler repeated his 'prophecy' spiel in a speech on 30 September 1942 at the Sportpalast in Berlin, he made his usual juxtaposition of how the war would not lead to the extermination of the German people but that it would lead to the extermination of the Jewish race. Ausrottung was always contrasted with Vernichtung; Hitler transposed the terms so that it is quite clear he was using synonyms and quite clear from all the repetitions that both words meant extermination.

This 'prophecy' slogan was first made on January 30, 1939; by the time he repeated it for the umpteenth time 44 months later, millions of Jews had been killed, and hundreds of thousands more were about to die in the remaining months of 1942.

In January 1939, the prophecy was a future threat, a rhetorical outburst, but every single dead Jew killed from that moment onwards indicated that Hitler wasn't just ranting, he was deadly serious. Hitler even said on 30 September 1942 that the Jews had laughed at him in 1939, but they were not laughing now.

Given that the largest Jewish community in Europe, the Warsaw ghetto, had just been reduced to a tiny remnant and had lost 250,000 people to Treblinka, it is clear what was meant.

If you want to pretend that Hitler wasn't referring in public to mass murder, then you'd need to explain, among many other things, what happened to the Jews of Warsaw in the summer of 1942. You'd also need to explain why contemporary observers, ranging from Jewish diarists in the Warsaw ghetto to newspapers in Switzerland, Sweden and Britain, interpreted Hitler's speech as confirmation that the Jews were now being murdered.

You'd also have to explain what Hans Frank, the Nazi Reichsleiter in charge of the region where Warsaw was situated, referred not only before the deportation from Warsaw (in December 1941) to the need for his administration to "liquidate them yourselves" but also referred in December 1942 to the "annihilation of the Jews" as ordered from a higher authority, and again in June 1943 to the "annihilation of the Jews" as something which was deeply problematic when it conflicted with the requirements of the war economy. And you'd have to explain why the chief medical officer of Warsaw wrote to Hitler in December 1942 protesting against plans to treat Poles being resettled by the Nazis the same as the Jews were being treated, "that is, to kill them".

There are countless more sources that would have to be explained, which is why the most convenient thing is to point you in the direction of the history books.

Even if you're unwilling to shell out money for those, you can still access very lengthy reports written by Browning and Longerich for the Irving vs Lipstadt trial, and download the HC critique on Aktion Reinhard, for free. The sources discussed in those works are pretty much the absolute basics as far as this 'debate' is concerned, since they are also often the same sources which can be found all over the internet. It doesn't take a lot of effort to find a translation of Frank's (secret) speech of 16 December 1941, for example. That speech is discussed in Browning's report and in the HC critique, as well as in countless history books.

Hitler's prophecy speech is discussed in Longerich's report as well as in the history books - in Kershaw's biography of Hitler, for example, as well as in Saul Friedlander's Years of Extermination. In the standard works on the subject, therefore. Ignorance is no defense in serious discussion; either you know what you're supposed to be talking about, or you don't.

Now, you can either engage with the material and try to make sensible comments about it, or you can continue to be a laughingstock for how furiously you handwave away easily accessible, easily understood and much discussed evidence.

 

[Dogzilla]

Do you not understand the difference between the word dislike and the word sabotage, especially when applied broadly to an entire group of people, to nearly all of whom the word sabotage doesn't remotely apply? Your trope here is deeply antisemitic.

You don't think Jews would fight back against the Nazis? You think Jews didn't actually resist Nazi occupation? You don't think there were any Jewish partisans? You think Jews are helpless defenseless pathetic wretched dwarfs (as runty as Kitchener's Army) who are happy to accept any abuse they receive and I'm deeply antisemitic?

Do you even believe that the Nazis considered Jews to be their enemy?

 

[Dogzilla]

Defense? Can you actually read or do you dictate your posts to an assistant?

He writes: "My research clearly shows that Irene Weisberg Zisblatt is not only a survivor of Auschwitz and the Holocaust, but that she, indeed, has an interesting and instructive story to tell. A story of endless humiliations and extreme suffering, but also of survival against all odds. It would be similar to those that hundreds of survivors can tell or have already told. It certainly would be less adventurous than that which she tells. But it would be in accordance with the historically established facts. Irene Weisberg Zisblatt should tell her story about survival at Auschwitz without exaggerations and implausibilities. It then would be a really true story, worth to be told and retold and to be listened to."

Yeah. That's what you call giving an old lady a pass.

 

[Nick Terry]

Sometimes I do wonder why the Dead Nazi PR Machine fails to investigate where those Jews allegedly went. Shouldn't it be like some holy grail for them if they were to prove that all those ended up somewhere alive and reasonably well?
Instead of trying to quibble every detail to death (which they actually fail to accomplish as can be seen here) they would have positive evidence for their alternative narrative.
The same goes for holocaust denial literature. Few of it does original research and instead either reiterates the same few talking points or is entirely dependent on the work of historians. To me it seems denier scholarship shines with its total absence.

The Dead Nazi PR Machine has the same problem as the actual Nazi PR machine, namely the impossible task of trying to explain away what happened to the deportees. That's why Goebbels stated in December 1942 that the Nazis did not have any 'Gegenbeweise' to disprove the Allied accusations of extermination and had best change the subject by making up crap about Allied atrocities.

This, btw, is piece of evidence #4,000 or so for the extermination of the Jews.

 

[Dogzilla]

Unfortunately, my remark wasn't a 'challenge' but a simple statement of how the world works. You can try to spin one or two statements referring to extermination, but such an approach will always fail when there is a larger number. This is the principle of total evidence. It isn't unique to this discussion, it's just that deniers violate it more frequently than normal people.

I'm quite sure that LemmyCaution and several others in this thread know exactly the kind of statements to which I was referring. They are the same statements that have been discussed in countless works since the 1940s. Hans Frank speaking to his cabinet on December 16, 1941, for example.

You seem a bit confused about what policy is. Policy refers to state practices decided upon by politicians and/or civil servants. The Nazis are deemed to have had a policy of extermination because the top politicians and the civil servants and other agents of the Nazi state not only kept on talking about it, but actually implemented it, as is demonstrated by numerous documents reporting on the mass killing and even mass gassing of Jews from 1941 onwards.

Thus, when an RSHA official (a civil servant) reported that 97,000 had been processed in gas vans which were clearly stationed at Chelmno, he was discussing the policy of extermination of Jews as implemented in the Warthegau.

When Hitler repeated his 'prophecy' spiel in a speech on 30 September 1942 at the Sportpalast in Berlin, he made his usual juxtaposition of how the war would not lead to the extermination of the German people but that it would lead to the extermination of the Jewish race. Ausrottung was always contrasted with Vernichtung; Hitler transposed the terms so that it is quite clear he was using synonyms and quite clear from all the repetitions that both words meant extermination.

This 'prophecy' slogan was first made on January 30, 1939; by the time he repeated it for the umpteenth time 44 months later, millions of Jews had been killed, and hundreds of thousands more were about to die in the remaining months of 1942.

In January 1939, the prophecy was a future threat, a rhetorical outburst, but every single dead Jew killed from that moment onwards indicated that Hitler wasn't just ranting, he was deadly serious. Hitler even said on 30 September 1942 that the Jews had laughed at him in 1939, but they were not laughing now.

Given that the largest Jewish community in Europe, the Warsaw ghetto, had just been reduced to a tiny remnant and had lost 250,000 people to Treblinka, it is clear what was meant.

If you want to pretend that Hitler wasn't referring in public to mass murder, then you'd need to explain, among many other things, what happened to the Jews of Warsaw in the summer of 1942. You'd also need to explain why contemporary observers, ranging from Jewish diarists in the Warsaw ghetto to newspapers in Switzerland, Sweden and Britain, interpreted Hitler's speech as confirmation that the Jews were now being murdered.

You'd also have to explain what Hans Frank, the Nazi Reichsleiter in charge of the region where Warsaw was situated, referred not only before the deportation from Warsaw (in December 1941) to the need for his administration to "liquidate them yourselves" but also referred in December 1942 to the "annihilation of the Jews" as ordered from a higher authority, and again in June 1943 to the "annihilation of the Jews" as something which was deeply problematic when it conflicted with the requirements of the war economy. And you'd have to explain why the chief medical officer of Warsaw wrote to Hitler in December 1942 protesting against plans to treat Poles being resettled by the Nazis the same as the Jews were being treated, "that is, to kill them".

There are countless more sources that would have to be explained, which is why the most convenient thing is to point you in the direction of the history books.

Even if you're unwilling to shell out money for those, you can still access very lengthy reports written by Browning and Longerich for the Irving vs Lipstadt trial, and download the HC critique on Aktion Reinhard, for free. The sources discussed in those works are pretty much the absolute basics as far as this 'debate' is concerned, since they are also often the same sources which can be found all over the internet. It doesn't take a lot of effort to find a translation of Frank's (secret) speech of 16 December 1941, for example. That speech is discussed in Browning's report and in the HC critique, as well as in countless history books.

Hitler's prophecy speech is discussed in Longerich's report as well as in the history books - in Kershaw's biography of Hitler, for example, as well as in Saul Friedlander's Years of Extermination. In the standard works on the subject, therefore. Ignorance is no defense in serious discussion; either you know what you're supposed to be talking about, or you don't.

Now, you can either engage with the material and try to make sensible comments about it, or you can continue to be a laughingstock for how furiously you handwave away easily accessible, easily understood and much discussed evidence.

You're back to 'where did they go?' You and all of Team holocaust will continue to fail with this gambit because they're not where you think they are. If they're not there, they must be somewhere else. Do you not understand the concept of mutual exclusivity?