I said I never denied mass shootings by the Einsatzgruppen. I deny Einsatzgruppen activity is evidence of an extermination policy and gas chambers. Lemmycaution continues spamming me to explain the Jagger report. I've done that. It's evidence of Einsatzgruppen activity. If he wants me to explain why it isn't evidence of gas chambers, he'll need to explain why it is first. And I mean something more definitive than saying that people who shoot women and children could easily build gas chambers or that there's nothing in the Jagger report that says there aren't gas chambers.
But as I have now said three times, you are misrepresenting LC's argument if you say he believes the Jaeger report is evidence of gas chambers. You are slipping from this
I deny Einsatzgruppen activity is evidence of an extermination policy and gas chambers.
which actually has a chance of leading to a discussion.
to this
If he wants me to explain why it isn't evidence of gas chambers, he'll need to explain why it is first.
which misrepresents LC's points as I recall them.
The Jaeger report, your denial notwithstanding, is prima facie evidence of an extermination policy in Lithuania, since not only does Jaeger say as much in the report, but the numbers recorded as executed also passed the 50% mark for the Lithuanian Jewish population
and reached into six figures.
I'm pretty sure the last time you were posting actively and received any responses on this issue, you fled to do your taxes just before several posts were made in the old thread which addressed the semantic/definitional issue of what can be considered extermination.
In the case of Lithuania, EK 3 and its Lithuanian auxiliaries wiped out shtetl after shtetl across the Lithuanian countryside, destroying entire communities in multiple four figure or high three figure actions. The murder of entire communities of Jews means that they were exterminated. The task of exterminating the provincial shtetls was assigned to Rollkommando Hamann, which supervised Lithuanian auxiliary police forces to do the bulk of the killing. Jaeger also talks about
that in the report.
The only Jews left alive in Lithuania were 'work Jews and their families' who were spared by the intervention of the civil administration and Wehrmacht. This frustrated Jaeger as he says in his report ('I also wanted to kill these Jews'). One can therefore draw a distinction between the policy qua aims and intentions of the SS, represented by Einsatzkommando 3, and the policy of other Nazi agencies.
While this conflict is of great interest to historians who find many other examples of what is known as polycratic conflict within the Third Reich, it does not change very much since the civil administration and Wehrmacht acquiesed and/or supported the SS, represented by Einsatzkommando 3, in the SS policy of exterminating Lithuanian Jewry, right up to the point where they tolerated five figure massacres in the big ghettos before saying 'no, we need to keep some alive'.
I suspect despite this explanation, you are going to try to spin out the likely semantic or definitional argument about what is extermination, but this will fail. It will fail because contemporaries, including the Nazis themselves regarded the mass murder of all but a minority of Jews spared for forced labour, as contributing to the Final Solution of the Jewish Question, which was to be brought about at the latest by early 1942 through the 'destruction' or 'annihilation' (Vernichtung) or 'extirpation' (Ausrottung) of Jewry, using a variety of methods. Jaeger's report documents the application of this policy on a regional scale, before the policy was to be applied more widely across Europe.
As German does not use the Latinate word 'extermination' but instead uses Vernichtung and Ausrottung, both in the 1940s and to the present day, these terms are frequently translated as 'extermination' as they were in dictionaries. German scholars will speak of Vernichtungspolitik. Vernichtung means literally 'annihilation' but is the standard word for destruction.
It is very hard to come up with a convincing reason why Christoph Dieckmann or Peter Longerich should be forbidden from using Vernichtungspolitik or Politik der Vernichtung to describe the events in Lithuania in 1941 which are recorded in the Jaeger report.
It is utterly impossible to deny the use of the term "genocide" to describe these events, since the killing of a majority (50%+) of an ethnic group with intent is very much within the definition of what is genocide. Genocidal intent is also proven by the Jaeger report since at no time does he rationalise the executions as having anything to do with partisan activity, and there is no other source offering partisan activity as an explanation or justification for these executions. There is also clear evidence of genocidal intent in his statement that 'I also wanted to kill these Jews', meaning bump off the 'work Jews' as well.
You would be right to point out that "genocide" is an ex post facto construction, and this is where your obstinacy really blows up in your face, because commentators and scholars have a long history of applying concepts to the past which were not there at the time, even if there are clear synonyms in circulation in the era in question. Since the worldwide community of commentators and scholars uses the UN definition of genocide as a starting point for all discussions, then that is that, really.
You are of course entitled to wage a lonely campaign to abolish the word, but this will fail since you are fairly isolated and unable to mobilise any significant support for your attempt to reconceptualise the current discourse on mass murder, which is much broader than the current discourse on the Holocaust.
You are likewise screwed in your apparent attempt to reconceptualise 'extermination'. The term extermination can be found used by contemporaries in the 1940s in a variety of contexts, and was used before 1939 to refer to mass killing, as well as the eradication of insects and vermin. The very fact that eradicating insects was known as 'extermination' meant that contemporaries applied it to the mass murder of human beings often fully aware of the resonances. Thus they talked about human beings 'exterminated like rats'.
Since 1945, extermination has of course come to be applied extensively to describe and conceptualise Nazi conduct towards Jews and other groups during WWII. Because of the German influence, there is a definite tendency to apply it
more broadly than simply restricting it to genocide. German scholars often speak of the 'Vernichtung' of Soviet prisoners of war in 1941-2, which can be translated as the 'extermination' of Soviet POWs in some books and 'destruction' in others. Other German scholars have written of regionale Vernichtungsaktionen, regional extermination actions.
There is no hard and fast consensus on what constitutes extermination, but the term is generally used more often than not when
1) a killing action reaches 3, 4, 5 or 6 figures, depending on the size of the target group and locality.
2) a killing action murders the majority of a target group in a particular locality or region. Thus, a village with 200 inhabitants can be described as 'exterminated' if every villager is killed.
3) a killing action includes women and children on a frequent basis. Thus antipartisan reprisals which wiped out entire villages, as was practised on a repeated basis by the Nazis, are extermination.
4) a killing action targets a specific group over a relatively short time, at a fairly high tempo
Historians such as Christian Gerlach have talked about Operation 'Cottbus' as an extermination action against Belorussian villagers, which is also how these actions are seen in Belorussia. And when the action reaches 10,000 people killed in a very short space of time and in a relatively small space, there is no real reason to disagree with them.
Likewise, the Commissar Order as applied in concentration camps, 'Aktion 14 f 14' can be considered an extermination action. All identified commissars and other groups defined by the directives were singled out and killed. Since the numbers reached 35,000 this also seems justified.
The euthanasia program, of course, is also seen as an extermination action, not least because of the killing method used, but also because of the systematic method of identifying candidates for death. Not all psychiatric patients were selected and murdered, but the mass murder of 70,000 people crosses well over a five figure threshold. T4 isn't a case of
genocide, but it most certainly involved the destruction (literally) of its victims and is commonly considered a case of extermination.
The Nazi policy towards Jews known as the Final Solution was also an extermination action. Jews regarded as unfit for work were exterminated, only a minority of able-bodied Jews were spared for forced labour. The expectation was that the Jewish forced labourers would be diminished over time through 'natural attrition', thus contributing to the overall 'destruction of the Jewish race in Europe'. In some cases, Jews spared at one stage were exterminated later on.
As with the ex post facto use of genocide, your possible quibbling will ultimately fail, because language is social and depends on consensus to work. The current consensus among commentators and scholars is that 'extermination' is an appropriate term to apply to Nazi policies towards Jews from 1941 onwards, based on all available evidence.
That consensus does not give a damn whether some anonymous troll on the internet thinks 'extermination' should not be used or should only be used in certain situations. The scholarly consensus merely takes note of the fact that there are a few kooks who like to play semantic/definitional games to further their crankery or politically motivated naysaying, who also delight in misrepresenting other people's arguments and misunderstanding easily comprehensible primary source documents.
You are, of course, free to continue your one-man campaign to revise the English language and airbrush 'extermination' out of scholarly parlance, but it is truly a long march to start such a campaign on an internet forum, well away from the institutions that matter.
More locally, your one-man campaign simply means you are talking past Lemmy Caution and others, as demonstrated by the fact that you misrepresented LC's argument and started babbling about how does the Jaeger report prove gas chambers.
To the extent that your argument is of any interest, it is in the fact that you have proven, yet again, Lyotard's observation that Holocaust deniers are playing a different language game to the rest of us, with the result that 'revisionism' is an incommensurable discourse, which is why it is shut out, reviled and laughed at. So thank you for that.
