Nick Terry
Illuminator
On the contrary, people have done all those things repeatedly, but you have simply ignored the connections and obfuscate the issues.
It has been pointed out repeatedly that the mass shootings (by a range of SS and Police forces, not just "the Einsatzgruppen", who were only one branch of the entire force) claimed over 2 million Jewish lives. We have consistently used more realistic figures of 5.1 to 5.3 million victims of the Nazi genocide, so right there you have a very direct tie to the numbers - 40% of the victims died in mass shootings.
You've also been told repeatedly that the mass shootings wiped out very close to 100% of the Jews in the occupied Soviet territories, and that they were used to wipe out the remaining Jewish population of Galicia after Belzec was closed. It's also certainly been pointed out more than once or twice that mass shootings accompanied the deportations inside western Poland. So the two processes are intertwined and overlap with each other, and cannot therefore be isolated with a handwave from you.
It's also been pointed out repeatedly that the Jaeger report contains language which indicates that Standartenfuehrer Jaeger saw his aim as the total elimination of Jews in Lithuania. This is not justified with reference to any of your strawmen about battling Bolshevism or fighting partisans, but was clearly an end in itself. The only reason he did not wipe out the entire Jewish population of Lithuania was that there were protests from the civil authorities and the Wehrmacht who wanted a minority kept alive as forced labourers.
That right there is your 'plan', the result of a compromise between different factions in the Nazi regime, which was elaborated a few weeks later at Wannsee - the able bodied would be kept alive for a time as forced labourers and then dealt with accordingly later on. This kept the pragmatists happy since they would not be deprived of all Jewish labour. The plan for the Europe-wide Final Solution was thus implemented from the outset through selection. Which is what the normative account says, and which is very clearly seen at Auschwitz.
We might also add, given your relentless obfuscation of 'exceptions', that there are no other exceptions mentioned in the case of Lithuania, since exceptions for intermarriage or being a war veteran were applied exclusively in the core Reich, to German and Austrian Jews. That was also part of the plan, which covered the whole of Europe, not just Germany and Austria.
The Einsatzgruppen were subordinated to the RSHA, and were mirrored in other parts of Europe by Security Police commands. Indeed, Einsatzkommando 3 became known as the Kommandeur der Sicherheitspolizei Litauen, and as such was a mirror image of KdS Warschau, KdS Krakau or KdS Lublin. Men from the Einsatzgruppen were transferred to western Europe or to annexed terrritories, thus Naumann from Einsatzgruppe B was sent to command the Security Police in the Netherlands, while Bradfisch from Einsatzkommando 8 became the Gestapo commander in Lodz, and thus they presided over deportation actions to death camps.
The RSHA, whether in the field as the Security Police or on the home front as the Gestapo (Staatspolizeistellen or Staatspolizeileitstellen) consistently used the term Sonderbehandlung to refer to executions, and did so often enough that there can be no doubt that they used it to mean killing since it was used interchangeably with liquidation, execution, shooting and hanging. So when an RSHA-commissioned report on the statistics for the Final Solution in 1942 written by Richard Korherr used the term Sonderbehandlung to refer to camps in the Government-General (i.e. Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka) and the Warthegau (i.e. Chelmno) this was evidently too much even for Himmler, who ordered a few examples edited out, but left in one and left a copy of the letter telling us precisely which lines to rewrite with further euphemisms. The same euphemism of Sonderbehandlung also recurs repeatedly in the context of Auschwitz.
Weak evidence? Historians don't think so. It's actually excellent evidence of the mentality of the SS that the specialists in violence who had to carry out the task euphemised the process, while the political entrepreneurs spoke far more blatantly of destruction and killing. It's also excellent evidence that the deportations in 1942 to Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka and Chelmno ended in death, something we can confirm from other sources of various provenances.
That's why when Hans Frank and other civilian officials of the Government-General spoke repeatedly of destroying the Jews in the GG, a little lightbulb goes off in the heads of human beings blessed with even a basic reading comprehension, and they correlate those statements with the eyewitness accounts from Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka. Which as is also well known come from not only the few survivors but also bystanders, Trawnikis and the SS, along with visitors. And then sensible people correlate all this with the postwar condition of the site and what was found there, and conclude that the witnesses were not lying.
Especially since we have countless cases across Europe, including western Poland, where witnesses - Jewish, bystander and Nazi - testified to mass shootings which can be documented and/or which were uncovered in exhumations after the war. Or which were recorded in contemporary sources like diaries, underground reports and manuscripts.
So when you blether that
you simply expose your ignorance not only of the evidence, but of the rules of evidence and of epistemology. In the philosophy of science, there's something called the principle of total evidence, which does what it says on the tin.
Contrary to your apparent delusion, neither historians nor courts are going to exclude witnesses, nor are they going to reduce what is considered 'evidence' solely to forensics. They're certainly not going to ignore documents and nor are they going to misrepresent organisational structures and plans like you do.
But I tell you what, if you think the 300+ direct witnesses to the Reinhard camps are "weak evidence" then please explain how the sum total of their testimony came into being, explaining how, why and when these witnesses came to become deluded and misreport what they saw.
I'd be even more curious how you explain how the 10s of 1000s of Auschwitz witnesses are all lying.
