Slayhamlet
Master Poster
- Joined
- Apr 26, 2007
- Messages
- 2,423
Which is the correct sentence?
Assuming you mean "what would the correct phrase be?", argumentum ad communem opinionem should work.
Which is the correct sentence?
I agree with you. That is why Clayton's posts read anti-semitic: he targets Jews for a supposed failure to act in ways that very few people would be able to act under the circumstances. Some Jews, as we know, in some circumstances, managed to organize and resist, some resisted in individual ways; most, however, were shocked into what comes across as a kind of numbness. Terrorized. In fact, to take this a step further, one technique which the Nazis used to manage their camps was terror which helped immobilize - your word, and one that is apt IMHO - the inmate victims. A similar use of terror as a strategy was also the case outside formal camps, e.g., in the ghettos. The reason I cited the fate of the Soviet POWs was to show that different groups of people - whether military or not - in these terrorized institutions suffered and reacted in ways that were not dissimilar. But of course Clayton denies terror in the camps and has mocked accounts of how terror was used.
What compels you to believe that I am concerned with "credibility"?
That's the wrong question. The moral of the story is that you shouldn't just run "appeal to shared belief" through Google Translate, or string together a list of mathematical symbols without any knowledge of the target domain. You may think it sounds impressive, but someone is going to call you on it and expose your ignorance. In fact, you may extend this argument to the main topic of this thread.![]()
Assuming you mean "what would the correct phrase be?", argumentum ad communem opinionem should work.
A few weeks ago, you said your goal here was to "expose you." You were responding to Nick, but presumably you were referring more generally to those who believe in the conventional Holocaust narrative.
If that's still your goal, you will need credibility.
In the poll thread started by tsig to gauge interest in a gas van thread, several JREF posters indicated unfamiliarity with gas vans. I'm fairly certain those people now have a better understanding by whom and for what purpose gas vans were operated because of the material posted in the moderated thread.Oh! The moderate thread! Yes!
I am glad observing how you and other users are silent craving for a "denier" appear on the thread.
Without a "denier" that thread is going to fade away...
Dr. Nicholas Terry, call the connoisseur Robert Faurisson a "senile retard" only shows your frailty to recognize and respect a person which profess the same science which you practice.
You previously complained that too many people were responding to you about too many subjects. After a posting hiatus you appear not to have prepared to tackle any of that material more thoroughly but you've again jumped into this thread at a seemingly random point and added another subject to the long list of issues you are unable to address.
No, Snakey, calling Faurisson a senile retard refers to the fact that he is now 83 years old, and has been a retard since at least the early 1970s, as demonstrated by his propensity for writing crank letters to French newspapers, mounting no-hope libel suits, and issuing proclamations and challenges instead of writing history books with things like a beginning, middle, end, argument, explanation.
And for being the author of one of the most moronic memes in denier-land, so moronic it is regularly used by the most stupid denier on JREF.
You have my attention. Not until you've documented an alternative explanation for the fate of those remembered among the dead on this day will there be a genuinely last post to you. So far you've not replied with anything that I consider an answer to the material with which you've been presented regarding persecution and mass murder. Any day now, surely. Take your time.I know you and others users of this forum are craving for attention.
From me that will be granted at my rate.
In enough time I will address your last posts to me.
Will reply to the rest later, but this attempt to conjure up a contradiction fails rather badly.
Firstly, it founders on the fact that I was responding to the idiotic assertion that a lack of Jewish labour would have brought the Nazi war machine grinding to a halt. Since the Nazi war machine was manned by 10s of millions of workers in both Germany and the occupied territories, and there were never more than about half a million Jewish forced labourers, the assertion that a lack of Jewish forced labour would have stopped the war machine is obvious nonsense.
Secondly, your attempt to conjure up a contradiction ignores how, who, what, where and why, all the questions one normally asks. Over the course of 1942-44, Jewish forced labour increasingly came to be directed under the KZ system, which was under direct SS control. The SS had its own economic enterprises and own economic interests, which required labour, and its own construction plans, which required labour. For example, the whole point of sending Jews to Auschwitz and Majdanek to work was so that the SS could dispose of a free source of labour to build up those camps as part of the General Plan East, an SS project. Other sources of labour, such as Soviet POWs, were unavailable to the SS by early 1942 since they were being directed into the war economy in Germany, or into the Wehrmacht as Hiwis and Osttruppen. Jews were a declared ideological enemy who were slated to die at the hands of the SS, and the SS made the decision to spare some of them to work for its own interests.
This policy was elaborated by the SS farming out contingents of cheap workers to businesses, eg IG Farben at Monowitz, but also many other firms. Himmler and Pohl came to pursue a strategy of marketing the KZ system to industry as a labour reservoir of last resort, offering KZ inmates to firms as extra labour over and above the labour allocations directed by the Labour Ministry and Sauckel agency. This was a win-win situation for the SS, since they received fees for farming out workers and also increased their importance within the war economy.
By 1944, the KZ system passed the half million mark. The increase happened because (a) Jews in ghettos were sent to Auschwitz, which expanded greatly, and also interned in a few other camps for labour projects and (b) the Gestapo arrested more and more foreign workers in the Reich for resistance/absences/other offences. This caused Speer to sit up and take notice because the foreign labourer workforce was losing 50,000 people a month by 1944 to the Gestapo, who then promptly turned the arrested foreigners over to the KZ system, which then employed them in a growing volume of armaments work.
Until the spring of 1944, there were large potential reservoirs of foreign workers available to be rounded up forcibly in the occupied territories. But then more and more occupied territories were lost or became ungovernable. Ukraine was essentially lost in the winter of 1943/44, France was very difficult with the maquis by spring 1944 and was lost from June 1944 onwards. Italy looked promising but half the country was lost by the spring of 1944. Belorussia was half controlled by partisans and was lost in June 1944.
It is therefore no coincidence that in the spring of 1944, the Nazis realised that they would have to reverse their previous policy towards Jewish labour, which had been decided in 1941/2 when the Nazis controlled far more territory and hadn't even started to deport millions of Ukrainians to the Reich. Because of the loss of Ukraine, in effect, Hitler okayed the use of Hungarian Jews in Germany for work. This was a total U-turn, and it was forced on the Nazis by their strategic predicament.
By the time that decision had been made (April 1944), there were essentially no Jews at liberty in Scandinavia, western Europe, Italy, the Balkans, or the Reich. They had all been deported or were in hiding and being rousted from hiding places. There were no Jews in the remaining occupied Soviet territories, except for 50,000 interned in three KZs in the Baltic states, who were the survivors of a much larger population in those territories, supplemented by the survivors of 30,000 German, Austrian and Czech Jews deported there in 1941-2.
In Poland, by the spring of 1944, instead of 3 million Jews there were 70,000 in the Lodz ghetto, the survivors of a quarter of a million in 1940, all working hard for the local Gauleiter who had stuck two fingers up at Himmler when Uncle Heinrich wanted to liquidate the ghetto. But the impending Soviet offensives gave him the excuse to liquidate the ghetto and sluice it through Auschwitz, selecting a slightly larger proportion for work because of the overall policy of using KZ labourers. Elsewhere in Poland, Jews were down to about 50,000, employed mostly in armaments work, and most closely controlled by the SS either directly (employed in SS-run factories) or indirectly (housed in SS-run camps and employed by somebody else).
So the Hungarian Jews were very close to the last remaining reserve of labour on the European continent, in the eyes of the Nazis. Yet most of them were useless, since the Hungarian government had skimmed off most oft he able bodied young men to serve in the Honved in labour battalions. Still, the Nazis managed to extract 25% of the 437,000 Hungarian Jews deported to Auschwitz from May to July 1944 and send them all over Germany to work as labourers. About 110,000 were added in this way, and many were sent to work in the new underground factories set up with the assistance of the SS (Kammler). This meant Uncle Heinrich got another gold star from Dolfy and the rest of the crowd, and seemed to be Mr Indispensible.
The other 75% of the Hungarian Jews, being essentially useless from a labour perspective, were exterminated.
Once we get to the summer of 1944, the survivors of the KZs in the Ostland and in Poland were evacuated westwards because by July 1944 you are talking a serious growing crisis in the labour market, exacerbated by the massive casualties at the front. So they were sluiced through Stutthof (for the Baltic camps) and Auschwitz (for Poland) and sent on to join the Hungarian Jews working all over Germany. Then the Lodz ghetto survivors arrive, and a few from the last waves of transports from the occupied territories or Theresienstadt, and that's when Otto Frank finds himself in a hospital in Auschwitz.
The situation changes, and changes again, and so did policies. Since about 70-80% of the Holocaust took place before the start of 1943, one can happily point to Nazi hubris as a root cause of their decision to start exterminating large numbers of people seemingly without a care for the economic consequences in the abstract.
But from the outset, the Nazis were not completely dumb, and consistently spared at least some of the Jews for work, either because the SS regarded them as 'their' source of free labour for SS purposes, or because a few agencies and regions were headed by Nazis who regarded Jews as useful labourers. Like Gauleiter Greiser, who was very happy for the SS to exterminate 145,000 Jews in his region, but kept hold of 95,000 to work for him in factories that profited him.
The closest the Nazis came to pursuing a policy of 100% immediate extermination - your seeming strawman - was in the occupied Soviet territories that had been Soviet before 1939. They were rendered judenfrei almost completely by spring 1942, with a handful of very marginal exceptions. The Nazis could seemingly "afford" to do this because the Soviets had evacuated most of the industry from this region and there was thus not so much to be done economically in the towns, making the Jews surplus to requirements. And because those territories suffered the absolute worst food shortages in all of Europe, due to the sheer size of the Ostheer on the Eastern Front. When the Ukrainian, Russian and Belorussian population starved to death in many cities, then it is clear that on the overall population balance-sheet, the Jews were entirely dispensible, unless they had a really crucial skill. Which since the factories were gone, was often a moot point.
Everywhere else in Europe, the extermination policy unfolded from the outset as a policy of selection. As is spelled out in the discussions between Greiser and Himmler re: the Warthegau, and as is spelled out in the Wannsee protocol.
Why selection? See above: the SS wanted to have its own free labour supply, and there were some factions within the regime that rated the value of Jewish labour somewhat higher than the ideologues.
Fair enough, at least this time you gave a reason why you called him a "senile retard".
Which meme he authored?
Thank you for that informative post. However, you seem to be mixing up Nazi policy toward KZ labor and Nazi policy toward the Jews. I don't know if it's intentional obfuscation or if you really are confused. But it would be helpful for your readers if you kept the two things separate in your mind.
Maybe I'm just looking at this too literally. I thought that when historians speak of Nazi Germany having a plan for the physical extermination of the Jews that meant that Nazi Germany had a plan for the physical extermination of the Jews. As in, all the Jews.
I understand the whole intentionalist vs functionalist debate. I understand how the Jewish policy "evolved" over time and I understand how the Jewish policy might be implemented slightly differently in different places and different times. I understand how anomalies and mistakes in implementing policy can occur. I understand that there will always be some rogue bureaucrat undermining the system in some small way. But I always understood the Final Solution to the Jewish Question to be a Hitler mandated physical extermination of all the Jews under the control of the Nazis. I would expect that the majority of the things Nazis did to Jews would reflect that policy.
I can buy into the explanation that some Jews under the control of the Nazis were able to survive the war because they performed labor that was necessary to the Nazis. But you insist that, no, the Jews did not perform labor that was critical to the war economy. (and in Total War, all labor is done for the benefit of the war economy).
You insist that until the spring of 1944, there were large potential reservoirs of foreign workers available to be rounded up forcibly in the occupied territories. So Jews didn't do anything non-Jews couldn't do and until the spring of 1944 there were plenty of non-Jews available to work as slave laborers for the Nazis. Since the policy towards the Jews since 1941/1942 at the latest had been physical extermination, why were there any Jews still left alive in the ghettos or the KZ system at all?
I can accept that there would be Hungarian Jews still around to be exploited late in the war because Hungary had been a nominally independent ally of Nazi Germany until 1944. But Polish Jews? Czech Jews? German Jews? Jews that had been caught up in the Nazi dragnet after it had been decided to exterminate them all and before the critical labor shortage made them valuable as workers should've been dead.
So you didn't answer the question: If there was a policy of physically exterminating the Jews and if Jewish labor wasn't necessary for the German economy, why weren't the Jews killed?
BTW, you said that 437,0000 Hungarian Jews were deported to Auschwitz. 25% of them were sent to work in Germany while the remaining 75% were exterminated. TSR said that "close to 500k Hungarian Jews can be documented as having been sent to Auschwitz, with no documentation of their (sic) ever going anywhere else." Which is it?
That's just stupid.
I didn't target Jews. I said that if, lets say Jews saw or knew of babies being smashed into walls, bayoneted, or thrown alive into fire pits as business as usual they would have been violent and out of control. In other words no Jewish person could be trusted TO NOT TO be violent at any time.
Violent behavior by authorities begets spontaneous violent retaliation by those being controlled.
And to say every camp guard and camp support person would go along with violence against babies is insane.
It's amusing that the Holocaustics refuse to admit that Jewish people would have retaliated with measured and unmeasured violence if they were subjected to the horrors of the Holocaust myth. The guards and all camp personal would been under siege 24/7. The Jewish people would have reacted like normal persons in the midst of rampant savagery and terror.
And meaningful labor? Like that would happen in the midst of rampant savagery and terror.
I think the Holocaustics watched too many galley/quarry slave scenes when they were kids.
It's amusing that the Holocaustics refuse to admit that Jewish people would have retaliated with measured and unmeasured violence if they were subjected to the horrors of the Holocaust myth. The guards and all camp personal would been under siege 24/7. The Jewish people would have reacted like normal persons in the midst of rampant savagery and terror.
And meaningful labor? Like that would happen in the midst of rampant savagery and terror.
I think the Holocaustics watched too many galley/quarry slave scenes when they were kids.
This post must be a forgery. The office code (or whatever) should be A II 3 c.
ETA: I realize I shouldn't have divulged what I thought the real code should be. I should just say that it is wrong and not elaborate on why I know this.