When did I ever say there's no evidence of people being deported? When did I say there is not copious documentation and other evidence of people being deported to Auschwitz, etc.?
It seems in all the excitement of last week I missed this one. As it's another Dogzilla classic, it's worth revisiting.
We start with Dogzilla misconstruing the following point:
Because everyone other than you gets the fact that the deportations to the death camps are documented with Nazi reports, transport lists, photos and copious witnesses. You claim that the death camps weren't death camps, so naturally people are going to ask you what happened instead, because they are aware that Jews really were deported to Auschwitz, Treblinka and the other camps, whatever you might try to pretend.
In typical dodging fashion, Dogzilla ignores all but the last clause. Let's remember, however, his standard response that the Jews went to the same place as the difference between the old 4 million Soviet figure for Auschwitz and the current accepted numbers of deportees.
It certainly is 'pretending' to act as if the 4M figure is the same as hard-documented evidence of deportation statistics, transport lists, railway telegrams informing commandants of the arrival of transports, etc.
What we've not yet seen is any sign that Dogzilla accepts the normative account of Jewish deportations and can deal with facts like the 1.27 million deported to the Reinhard camps in 1942, or the 1.1 million Jews deported to Auschwitz from 1942-44, or the 152,000 Jews that are documented as deported at Chelmno.
Nothing he ever says shows the slighest ability to explain those facts; indeed he simply ignores them, and that's one of many, many reasons why he is continually asked what happened to the Jews deported to the death camps. And will go on being asked this.
What you don't have is evidence that these places were death camps. If you want to pretend they were death camps you need evidence that these people were killed there.
Such evidence is superabundant, despite what you believe, and you've made no demonstrable effort to acquaint yourself with the evidence, instead preferring the 'no evidence' spam routine. The fact that you DON'T discuss the totality of the evidence for the death camps is another reason why you're constantly asked what happened to the deportees.
If you actually engaged properly in a discussion of, for example, the wartime reports written on the death camps by Polish underground movements, or the manuscripts and diaries produced by bystanders and escapees during the war, then there might be something else to discuss other than asking you what happened. But you don't engage properly in any kind of discussion. It's all handwaving and dodging.
I am answering honestly. I didn't know these people . There are too many people I do know and care about for me to bother with people who lived on the other side of the world before I was born. So, no, I don't care.
Yet you care enough to repeatedly claim that people you don't know and aren't bothered about did not die 70 years ago. As long as you assert that they didn't die there, people are going to ask you what happened to them.
This follows logically as night follows day. You apparently accept that the victims were deported to these camps, although you've never stated this overtly and clearly (as in 'yes, 781,000 Jews were deported to Treblinka in 1942'). So if you say that all the evidence is wrong and they didn't die there, then you're forever going to be asked what happened to them.
This is very simply a historical question, which should be answerable. Your antics deliberately kick the discussion into touch, rendering something that could be clear and understandable into a marathon of obfuscation.
It so happens that about the same number of supposed "kulaks" were deported during dekulakisation under Stalin as there were Jews deported to the death camps (and only the death camps), just over two and a half million. We have chapter and verse from the Soviet records on the "special settlements" to which the "kulaks" were sent. There are reports for the Politburo and local authorities on how many were still present and what happened to the others - how many died, how many ran away. The precise locations of the settlements are known - some are of course still inhabited to this day, even if the towns were founded in 1930 to accommodate the new arrivals. And historians like Lynn Viola can write whole books (like
The Unknown Gulag) about what happened to the kulaks after they were deported.
Now, nobody here is really expecting that you personally could write such a book. But the fact is that nobody on your side of the fence has ever attempted such a thing. We have literally no details from revisionists on what happened to the Jews deported to Auschwitz, Treblinka et al. That's a huge red flag, and destroys the credibility of your other claims.
I don't know what happened to these people but neither do you.
On the contrary, I know that they died in the death camps. So does everyone else in this thread, other than Clayton Moore. So do all professional historians, all relevant courts, all nation-states and all international organisations.
You and I both know they got on trains and were transported to various camps. That is where we both lost track of them.
I'm not the one who has lost track of them. You are. I know that the deportees were taken from the trains and killed. Then their bodies were burned. En masse.
Neither you nor I know what happened to them after that. We both know they are missing.
Individual deportees are "missing" in a legal sense because the Nazis did not bother to produce name lists specifying that so-and-so had just been gassed, nor did they bury the victims in individual caskets with headstones. So what? The issue is not what happened to one individual, but to 2.6 million people.
Legally, such a missing persons case translates into a declaration of death after a few years. Those 'missing' are legally dead. Indeed, bluespaceoddity has repeatedly pointed out that the Dutch Red Cross certified deportees to Sobibor as dead in missing-persons enquiries after the war.
But you believe that if they had survived, they wouldn't be missing.
The available evidence is quite clear that the inmates of the Warsaw ghetto deported to Treblinka in the summer of 1942 were killed there on arrival, with only a handful of exceptions who are clearly identified by the evidence (Sonderkommandos and known escapees). We don't have name lists for who was in the Warsaw ghetto at the start of July 1942. There were no transport lists. There are no death lists. The historical fact is based entirely on statistics, since we
do know that there were x number of inhabitants of the ghetto at the start of July, and we
do know how many were deported on what days through the summer, until the action stopped in September 1942.
We know from other sources that certain individuals were deported, such as Janusz Korczak. So he's "missing". No property survived for anyone to claim after the war from his estate, not least because Warsaw was razed in 1944 by the Nazis. So most probably he's never been declared legally dead the way that large numbers of German Jews were declared legally dead after 1945.
That doesn't change the fact that Korczak was last seen alive on a train bound for Treblinka, and that he was not reported inside the camp by a single survivor of Treblinka, nor that Treblinka was demonstrably an extermination camp, so absent any contrary evidence, he died on the way to or at Treblinka.
Arthur Gold, by contrast, was also deported from Warsaw and was selected for the Sonderkommando because he was a famous musician and composer, so he ran the camp orchestra set up to amuse the SS. His presence in Treblinka is reported by countless witnesses. Some of them state that he died in the revolt on August 2, 1943. Arthur Gold certainly never looked up his cousin
Jerzy Petersburski after the war. Gold had copyrights on compositions, but his relatives lived in a socialist state, so go figure.
Both of these men are dead as far as history is concerned, and as far as the law is concerned - if there were any reason to seek a legal declaration.
You also believe that if they didn't survive, they were murdered by the Nazis.
Exactly backwards. They were murdered by the Nazis, and therefore they didn't survive. You say they weren't murdered by the Nazis, so naturally the very first question you're going to be asked is what happened to them,
So because they are missing, they didn't survive and because they didn't survive, they must've been murdered.
Again, exactly backwards. The victims were murdered by the Nazis
en masse. There is copious evidence for this. Therefore, they didn't survive
en masse.
Individual fates cannot necessarily be ascertained to 100% certainty, but this simply triggers the status of missing-and-legally-dead after a very few years. That is the SAME legal provision which allowed countless German women to declare their husbands as dead after they failed to return from combat service in WWII.
There are still a million 'missing' German soldiers from WWII whose bodies and graves have not been located, but every single one of them is legally dead. There is no doubt that they died in the war, as a result of the war. We also now know that the Soviets kept sufficiently good records that they died on or near to the battlefield, not in a POW camp.
So the fact that we cannot locate the grave of Willy Peter Reese is irrelevant to our understanding of this soldier's short life; he wrote very affecting essays on his experiences in the Wehrmacht, which survived and have been published. He went missing during Operation 'Bagration' in June 1944, and was undoubtedly a battle casualty. Whether he was killed by a bomb, shell, mortar round, grenade or a bullet of whatever calibre is irrelevant. He was missing presumed killed in action, the same message that millions of families received in WWII.
The problem is that you don't have any evidence they were actually murdered.
That would be a problem if it were actually true, but it's not true, since there is plentiful evidence of mass murder of Jews at the death camps by the Nazis.
You just don't have clear evidence of anything else. At best, you have speculation based upon a false dichotomy.
Where is the false dichotomy? The available evidence indicates that deported Jews were murdered en masse at Auschwitz, Treblinka et al. This evidence is sufficient for all relevant authorities, courts, governments and international organisations to accept this as a fact, for all manner of purposes, including sorting out the estates of individuals who have been deported. The evidence is also sufficient for the entire profession of historians as well as every other academic discipline to include it in their understanding of 20th Century history.
You come along and say that this evidence is insufficient or that there is 'no' evidence. If your claim is to be believed, then people are going to need more than the endless 'no, no, no, no' that is basically all you have to offer. So naturally they ask you what happened to the deported Jews.
I don't believe in this false dichotomy. I don't accept something is true just because I don't have evidence that something else is true.
The fact that you don't accept the death camps are true is epistemologically irrelevant, since that is purely your own personal incredulity. You have failed to convince
anyone else to join you in this disbelief because you have not shown the slightest ability to
1) discuss the totality of the evidence for the death camps
2) provide any evidence of 'hoaxing' (to use a shorthand)
3) provided an alternative explanation of what happened instead
You don't seem to have noticed that your contentions about mass graves and other blether are generally rejected or seen as irrelevant gambits. They are "eminently disputable" and lack sufficient persuasive power to convert other people to your way of thinking. What might increase their persuasiveness is providing some form of evidence to show what happened instead.
What I do like about your theory of what happened is that there would be clear and unambiguous evidence that it happened if it indeed happened. We don't have that clear and unambiguous evidence. We have seventy years of excuses for why we can't look for that evidence. So I look at all the facts and say that we know these people got on trains. We know they went to these various camps. We know there aren't large Jewish communities at these camps today so we can rule out them settling there. We haven't found or haven't looked for the evidence that would exist if hundreds of thousands of Jews had been buried there. So we can't just assume they were. These people are missing.
What a load of twaddle. There is plentiful evidence for what happened. That evidence includes site inspections, forensics, archaeological digs as well as cross-examining every available witness and examining thousands upon thousands of documents.
There is so much evidence that the only way it can be challenged properly is to provide counter-evidence. You could present a convincing analysis of how all the witnesses were coached and rehearsed by whoever (identifying the whoever, of course), or that all the SS witnesses were demonstrably coerced. You could prove that Krege really did show undisturbed soil at Treblinka rather than the opposite. You could show us that the Jews of Warsaw were all sent onwards to Smolensk, or Kiev, or Brest-Litovsk, and explain what happened to them from September 1942 onwards.
You seem not to have noticed that quite a few people on your side of the fence have made claims along these lines. This document was forged. That witness was tortured. The other witness is a plagiarist. The Jews went to Belarus. They went to Ukraine. Et cetera.
However silly these claims are, they at least have the merit of recognising that someone in your position has a minimal burden of proof to advance evidence in order to make the core claim more persuasive.
A forgery discussion of the kind that SnakeTongue tried out a couple of times would be infinitely more interesting than your current blether. Of course, it would also run the risk of blowing up in your face, as it did for SnakeTongue, but jesus frakking christ, give us a break.
So where did they go? I imagine Israel, the United States, Australia. I don't know that is where they went but I think those would be good places to look for them. You imagine they went under the sandy soil of the death camps. You don't know that is where they went but if you cared about what happened to them, you would look. If you looked and found them, then you would know. If you found out you didn't know then you could start looking somewhere else, if you cared.
You've rather skipped over the period from 1942 to 1945 when as a matter of simple geographical and temporal logic, the deported Jews would have remained in Nazi hands. The question 'what happened to them' is ultimately about what happened to them in the months and years following, not 7 decades down the line. It's a question about Nazi-occupied Europe. To answer it at all, you need to know just a little something about the Nazi occupation of Europe, especially Eastern Europe.
It's funny, you try and make a big fuss about issues of time and space inside the extermination camps but seem blithely unconcerned about issues of time and space outside the extermination camps. People do not teleport from A to B even today, much less in the 1940s. There are national borders, immigration controls and records, as well as issues like front lines, occupation zones, and Nazi records of the occupation zones, to consider.
A dozen hoops have to be jumped through to get Janusz Korczak from Treblinka accompanying his orphanage to Tel Aviv or Miami. And that's if you want to follow a named individual. The same number of hoops have to be jumped through to get the 250,000 Jews of Warsaw deported to Treblinka in the summer of 1942 to Israel or the US.
Why? Because we can follow the Jews of Warsaw who were spared for labour and survived the camps from Warsaw through Majdanek to Budzyn to Mielec to Mauthausen to a DP camp to an emigration ship to a passport control and on through their immigration papers. We can follow whole transports of 500 or 1,000 people across the Nazi camp system or occupied territories, if they're alive. Live people leave a paper trail.
Nominating Israel and the US as places to look is entirely back to front. You need to start in Europe. With Nazi records, then Allied records, then the ITS and ICRC. Or explain why all traces of people that should be alive have vanished. Which means once again presenting evidence for a cover-up.
The fact is that there have been thousands of historians who have pored over every aspect of WWII in every occupation zone or occupied country, who have looked at every town and region, every postwar trend like displaced persons and repatriations. Sooner or later, if your claim that 2.6 million Jews did not die in extermination camps is true, you're going to have to present evidence that contradicts convincingly the existing historical record of events outside the camps from 1942 to 1945 and beyond.
But that's not the only reason why nobody believes you, Dogzilla. To repeat, you have not shown the slightest ability to:
1) discuss the totality of the evidence for the death camps
2) provide any evidence of 'hoaxing' (to use a shorthand)
3) provided an alternative explanation of what happened instead
We can of course shift to #2 if you'd like. You'll be squirming and dodging on that one, too, in no time.
