General Holocaust Denial Discussion Part II

[A'isha]

I know what it didn't contain: the fate of the Russians.

A) The OP asked about the Nazi plan for the "Slavic people in the East", which includes more than just Russians, and B) you apparently aren't reading Dr. Terry's posts.

According to me, not much good. To use manufactured or at the least manipulated evidence to support that hypothesis is however ridiculous.

And you haven't shown that it's either.

 

[pakeha]

I love these kinds of threads; not because of anything the OP can come up with, but because of the amazingly detailed and informative posts correcting it.

I'm with you there.

 

[Gawdzilla Sama]

I love these kinds of threads; not because of anything the OP can come up with, but because of the amazingly detailed and informative posts correcting it.

The only real value of a conspiracy theory is the educational opportunities that evolve from debunking it.

 

[EtienneSC]

Well, I think it's an offshoot of their denial of the holocaust. I mean, they deny the mass murder of Jews because they hate Jews. They deny the other parts of the holocaust because not doing so would make their denial of the mass murder of Jews inconsistent.

Or possibly because they ascribe to the same dumb racial theories as the old Nazis did, I suppose.

At least that's my take on it.

Fact is, a great many of the Hitler Huggers deep down 100% approve what Hitler and the Nazis did,and what they planned to do, but they know they can't say that in so many words so they defend the Nazis by denying the Nazis did what they did.
"The Holocaust never happened, but the Jews had it coming" is a good description of Hitler Hugger philosophy.

Even if this were true, people who believe in the holocaust also have their psychological and political motives, but their motivation is a distinct question from whether what they believe is true or not.

 

[MaGZ]

Karin Magnussen admitted receiving eyes from Auschwitz. That she may have denied the eyes were from murdered children doesn't negate the reality of the experiments; for starters she was not at Auschwitz so anything she said about the gathering of the material is hearsay. Other witnesses say that children were killed for this purpose. Her admission is one of a number of pieces of evidence showing a connection between Mengele and the KWI, and thereby proving that there WERE experiments.

Which is all that matters, since your original incredulity suggested there weren't any at all. You are simply wrong on that.

It is quite clear that the experiments and research involved a diverse range of methods, as mentioned, anthropometric measurements, blood tests, as well as some autopsies. Only some of the subjects were evidently killed, otherwise there would be no survivors.

Try reading Achim Trunk's paper in full; he clarifies what experiments involved rabbits and which ones used human subjects; he also refutes some claims by earlier historians by reexamining the evidence. Proper revisionism, not the junk kind we see from deniers.

Were those children killed for their eyeballs?

 

[MaGZ]

Aside from the fact that there are recordings of the speech, we also have contemporary sources indicating the reactions of those who attended it, most notably Goebbels writing about the speech in his diary and paraphrasing the sentiments expressed. Goebbels wrote:



This source dates from the day after one of the Posen speeches, and was written down in a private diary; it is thus much better evidence than a later testimony from anyone who attended the speech who might have pretended not to be there (like Albert Speer) or tried to obfuscate the speech (like Gottlob Berger) in order to distance themselves from the sentiments expressed.

Himmler was even more blunt in a speech on 21 June 1944 at Sonthofen:



We also have reactions from Wehrmacht generals who attended this speech, given independently, which confirm that Himmler really did talk bluntly about extermination and was understood to be talking bluntly about extermination.

Could you provide a list of those in attendance at the Himmler speech and give examples of measures taken to implement this decision. Also was this approved by Hitler or was Himmler acting on his own?

 

[MaGZ]

To be true to history, one should provide a more in-depth quote as opposed to the one snippet which caught your attention.

Specifically:

Nearly all the wartime documentation on Generalplan Ost was deliberately destroyed shortly before Germany's defeat in May 1945.[3][4] Thus, no copies of the plan were found after the war among the documents in German archives. Apart from Ehlich's testimony, there are several documents which refer to this plan or are supplements to it. Although no copies of the actual document have survived, most of the plan's essential elements have been reconstructed from related memos, abstracts and other ancillary documents.

One principal document which made it possible to recreate with a great deal of accuracy the contents of Generalplan Ost is a memo of April 27, 1942 entitled Stellungnahme und Gedanken zum Generalplan Ost des Reichsführers SS ("Opinion and Ideas Regarding the General Plan for the East of the Reichsführer-SS") and written by Dr. Erich Wetzel, the director of the Central Advisory Office on Questions of Racial Policy of the Nazi Party (Leiter der Hauptstelle Beratungsstelle des Rassenpolitischen Amtes der NSDAP). This memorandum is an elaboration of Generalplan Ost.
​

Now then, you may be suprised to learn that the Nazis tried to destroy the documentation of their crimes; however I (and many, many, many others) have known that the Nazis tried to destroy the documentation about their various crimes for quite some time now.

So you believe the Nazis were successful in destroying these documents?

 

[MaGZ]

Wetzel's commentary is quite explicit in places. He states that the evacuation of Jews earlier planned “is no longer necessary due to the solution of the Jewish question" (Heiber p.305) and that “one cannot solve the Polish question by liquidating the Poles like the Jews.” (Heiber p.308)

This was after all a commentary on a document we haven't seen (a not unusual state of affairs in recorded history). Wetzel objects to many of the premises some on more humanitarian grounds otherwise he wouldn't object to the solution of the Polish question on potentially the same lines as the liquidation of the Jews. He also objects to the numbers since he thinks they don't add up to bring about the planned reduction by 31 million in the area to be colonised by the Germans.

The core plan envisaged the expulsion of the stated numbers of surplus Slavs to Siberia. This was fundamentally about ethnic cleansing. No such expulsion could take place without losses; this does not mean that the Nazis planned to kill all the surplus Slavs. The Nazis discussed other population reduction measures such as restricting births and encouraging abortion on many other occasions from 1940 onwards.

Extermination in the casual/colloquial sense is certainly not the right word for what was intended. Genocide is the right word, because the plan foresaw dramatic population reductions that would undoubtedly have caused immense human losses, thereby qualifying for the UN Genocide Convention definition ('in whole or in part'). Forced Germanisation and baby-stealing also counts as genocide in international law, by the way; just read the convention; and the Nazis certainly engaged in both during the war.

The Nazis carried out a pilot project in the Zamosc region of the Lublin district, which was one of the settlement strongpoints foreseen under the GPO, in late 1942. This resulted in substantial numbers being deported to Auschwitz and Majdanek (some were then liquidated outright at Auschwitz), and inflamed partisan resistance which led to the deaths of thousands during Nazi antipartisan operations harnessed to the goal of clearing villages.

The Poles became fairly convinced that they were next, since this operation came hot on the heels of the mass murders of Jews in Poland. Further east similar fears were expressed that after the Jews the Poles were next. Then Ukrainian nationalists launched their own campaign of ethnic cleansing in Volhynia and Galicia, which killed between 60 and 100,000 Poles. Of course, many Poles consider this to be genocide; it would certainly qualify as a genocidal massacre (term used to describe a more localised ethnic based killing action or wave of killings).

After the war, Poland and Ukraine conducted fairly orderly population exchanges while Poland and other East European states expelled 14 million ethnic Germans. There were at least 600,000 casualties and German folk memory has the number down at 2 million. Some consider those expulsions to meet the convention definition of genocide, too.

The notion that Siberia could really support 31 or however many million extra people is of course also contradicted by what happened when Stalin carried out dekulakisation in 1930. A significant proportion died en route or shortly after arrival due to the chaotic organisation of the population transfer.

The Nazis abandoned the Generalplan Ost in 1943 because of the way the war was going. This coincided with a much more positive political warfare strategy designed to increase pro-Nazi and anti-Bolshevik collaboration among Poles and Russians. Obviously that was too little too late after what had transpired since 1939 in Poland and since 1941 in the occupied Soviet Union.

Pretty much every Russian who is historically literate will tell you that the Nazis DID commit genocide against the Russian people because they succeeded in bumping off even more Soviet civilians and POWs than Jews who died in the Holocaust. Poles are pretty much the same way, they point to the targeted liquidation of intelligentsia and leadership elites in 1939-40 and the heavy losses suffered through the war, and say they suffered genocide at the hands of the Nazis.

And they will all point to the Generalplan Ost as an indicator of the ultimate Nazi intentions towards Slavs in Eastern Europe. Given that the occupation regimes were explicitly colonial in character and given the Hunger Plan of 1941, then they certainly have a point.

'Extermination' in the 100%-killed-straight-away sense, no. Mass violence, mass starvation, ethnic cleansing and planned population reductions of unbelievable magnitude, yes.

At what point in time did the NS leadership decide to recruit the Slavs into the German army? I understand there were over a million Slavic volunteers. How did Himmler take this?

 

[MaGZ]

Wetzel's commentary is quite explicit in places. He states that the evacuation of Jews earlier planned “is no longer necessary due to the solution of the Jewish question" (Heiber p.305) and that “one cannot solve the Polish question by liquidating the Poles like the Jews.” (Heiber p.308)

This was after all a commentary on a document we haven't seen (a not unusual state of affairs in recorded history). Wetzel objects to many of the premises some on more humanitarian grounds otherwise he wouldn't object to the solution of the Polish question on potentially the same lines as the liquidation of the Jews. He also objects to the numbers since he thinks they don't add up to bring about the planned reduction by 31 million in the area to be colonised by the Germans.

The core plan envisaged the expulsion of the stated numbers of surplus Slavs to Siberia. This was fundamentally about ethnic cleansing. No such expulsion could take place without losses; this does not mean that the Nazis planned to kill all the surplus Slavs. The Nazis discussed other population reduction measures such as restricting births and encouraging abortion on many other occasions from 1940 onwards.

Extermination in the casual/colloquial sense is certainly not the right word for what was intended. Genocide is the right word, because the plan foresaw dramatic population reductions that would undoubtedly have caused immense human losses, thereby qualifying for the UN Genocide Convention definition ('in whole or in part'). Forced Germanisation and baby-stealing also counts as genocide in international law, by the way; just read the convention; and the Nazis certainly engaged in both during the war.

The Nazis carried out a pilot project in the Zamosc region of the Lublin district, which was one of the settlement strongpoints foreseen under the GPO, in late 1942. This resulted in substantial numbers being deported to Auschwitz and Majdanek (some were then liquidated outright at Auschwitz), and inflamed partisan resistance which led to the deaths of thousands during Nazi antipartisan operations harnessed to the goal of clearing villages.

The Poles became fairly convinced that they were next, since this operation came hot on the heels of the mass murders of Jews in Poland. Further east similar fears were expressed that after the Jews the Poles were next. Then Ukrainian nationalists launched their own campaign of ethnic cleansing in Volhynia and Galicia, which killed between 60 and 100,000 Poles. Of course, many Poles consider this to be genocide; it would certainly qualify as a genocidal massacre (term used to describe a more localised ethnic based killing action or wave of killings).

After the war, Poland and Ukraine conducted fairly orderly population exchanges while Poland and other East European states expelled 14 million ethnic Germans. There were at least 600,000 casualties and German folk memory has the number down at 2 million. Some consider those expulsions to meet the convention definition of genocide, too.

The notion that Siberia could really support 31 or however many million extra people is of course also contradicted by what happened when Stalin carried out dekulakisation in 1930. A significant proportion died en route or shortly after arrival due to the chaotic organisation of the population transfer.

The Nazis abandoned the Generalplan Ost in 1943 because of the way the war was going. This coincided with a much more positive political warfare strategy designed to increase pro-Nazi and anti-Bolshevik collaboration among Poles and Russians. Obviously that was too little too late after what had transpired since 1939 in Poland and since 1941 in the occupied Soviet Union.

Pretty much every Russian who is historically literate will tell you that the Nazis DID commit genocide against the Russian people because they succeeded in bumping off even more Soviet civilians and POWs than Jews who died in the Holocaust. Poles are pretty much the same way, they point to the targeted liquidation of intelligentsia and leadership elites in 1939-40 and the heavy losses suffered through the war, and say they suffered genocide at the hands of the Nazis.

And they will all point to the Generalplan Ost as an indicator of the ultimate Nazi intentions towards Slavs in Eastern Europe. Given that the occupation regimes were explicitly colonial in character and given the Hunger Plan of 1941, then they certainly have a point.

'Extermination' in the 100%-killed-straight-away sense, no. Mass violence, mass starvation, ethnic cleansing and planned population reductions of unbelievable magnitude, yes.

Are you suggesting the Germans were responsible for the Katyn massacre?

 

[MaGZ]

In every post in this thread where you've questioned...well, pretty much everything written about it, and compared it to the classic denier canard implying that the gas chambers at Auschwitz didn't exist.

If you don't deny that Generalplan Ost existed at all, what is it that you think it contained? What is it that the Nazis actually planned for the non-German peoples of the East, according to you?

We can only speculate what the plan really contained if it existed at all. It sounds a lot like a German form of Manifest Destiny.

 

[CaptainHowdy]

Here is a sample:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6yi9hT8ES2g
Himmler states that 'Ausrottung' (here translated 'extermination', but more literally 'eradication' or 'rooting out') is in the party program, which is not so in the sense of extermination, but is in the sense of emigration. The party program stated:
"7. We demand that the state be charged first with providing the opportunity for a livelihood and way of life for the citizens. If it is impossible to sustain the total population of the State, then the members of foreign nations (non-citizens) are to be expelled from the Reich.

8. Any further immigration of non-citizens is to be prevented. We demand that all non-Germans, who have immigrated to Germany since the 2 August 1914, be forced immediately to leave the Reich."
http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/25points.asp

Maybe it's the word "forgery" that is tripping me up. When you say "forgery" I interpret that to mean that you believe the speech was not delivered by Himmler but by somebody who sounds like Himmler saying things that Himmler never said. Is that what you mean or do you believe that the speech is Himmler's but that what he is saying is being misrepresented?

 

[Gawdzilla Sama]

We can only speculate what the plan really contained if it existed at all. It sounds a lot like a German form of Manifest Destiny.

I sometimes wonder how people can think it's okay to justify Group A's actions by saying "Well, Group B did something very like it!" By that logic murder would be justifiable based on the Supreme Court's ruling in Abel v. Cain.

 

[Nick Terry]

At what point in time did the NS leadership decide to recruit the Slavs into the German army? I understand there were over a million Slavic volunteers. How did Himmler take this?

The Nazis started recruiting armed collaborators already in July 1941, starting with policemen from the Baltic states - they later established 3 Waffen-SS divisions of Latvians and Estonians. The Baltic people were Germanisable.

Elsewhere there was a certain preferential recruitment of Ukrainians for police and other functions, which eventually led to the formation of an SS division in Eastern Galicia. This fit with a divide-and-rule strategy of playing Ukrainians off against Poles and Ukrainians off against Russians. The SS also recruited a largely Ukrainian force trained at Trawniki.

The Army controlled half of the occupied territories and needed collaborators, too, including police. The SS had to tolerate this out of pragmatism but really, really didn't like it. From 1942 the Army and Rosenberg Ministry tried to mobilise Russians for armed service, which contradicted the more hardline racialist vision seen in the SS and the Party Chancellery. The Vlasov army was a largely propaganda endeavour started after Stalingrad, and it was nipped in the bud by Himmler and Bormann. Lots of individuals and small units were however established. Divisions did not emerge until late 1944 when all was essentially lost.

All of these protagonists had a soft spot for Cossacks, Tatars and the Caucasian peoples, so legions of these nationalities, seen as non-Russian, were established as well.

Nazi policy towards the Soviet Union was rent with contradictions: the essentially colonial goals seen in the GPO prevented the development of full collaboration, the best example being racially inferior Lithuania, where there was huge anti-Soviet enthusiasm and where many policemen were recruited. But Himmler didn't want Lithuania to be independent because of the long-term goals of Germanic settlement. Similar factors inhibited full collaboration elsewhere; nobody could be quite sure what the Nazis would do in the long term.

 

[Nick Terry]

Were those children killed for their eyeballs?

Yes, some of the estimated 1500 twins used as test subjects were killed in Auschwitz so their irises could be sent to Berlin for further research.

 

[Nick Terry]

Could you provide a list of those in attendance at the Himmler speech and give examples of measures taken to implement this decision. Also was this approved by Hitler or was Himmler acting on his own?

Speeches plural. The two speeches in October 1943 were given to the SS-Gruppenfuehrer on the one hand, and the Party leadership on the other (Reichsleiter, Gauleiter, ministers). In June 1944 Himmler spoke to a number of Wehrmacht generals.

There are no attendance lists but there are enough statements from the time and subsequently to get an idea of who was there. The October 1943 speech to the civilian leadership is very controversial because Speer was addressed directly by Himmler in his speech

Himmler was not acting on his own, he cited Hitler as the source of the order to carry out the Final Solution. Hans Frank did the same thing in December 1942.

As for 'examples of the measures taken to implement the decision', try reading a history of the Holocaust....

 

[Nick Terry]

All sweet and nice and you are correct, but Poles are off-topic. Thread title?

I didn't ask you to concede a strawman, instead I asked you to concede MaGZ's point since you seem to divert from extermination to "genocide" while the actual correct term would have been ethnic cleansing.

Thread got merged, rightly so, thus nothing is off-topic.

The correct term for Nazi colonisation plans in Eastern Europe is genocide.

Ethnic cleansing is little more than a synonym for genocide, given the UN convention definition and given how most instances of ethnic cleansing are now assessed. The term comes from the war in Yugoslavia in the 1990s, right? Try looking up the ICTY cases where Bosnian Serbs and others were convicted of genocide.

Also try looking at Raphael Lemkin's original chapter on genocide in Axis Rule in Occupied Europe. He describes Nazi policies of Germanisation across the whole of Europe as genocide.

 

[Nick Terry]

Even if this were true, people who believe in the holocaust also have their psychological and political motives, but their motivation is a distinct question from whether what they believe is true or not.

The difference is that people who disbelieve the Holocaust are a distinct minority, whose motives for rejecting the evidence can be reduced to a relatively small number of specific political positions and/or psychological causes.

By contrast, the acceptance of the Holocaust as a historical fact manifestly transcends political affiliations and extends across the entire political spectrum; there are even some on the extreme right who have the political maturity to accept that the Nazis committed genocide against the Jews.

Since acceptance of the Holocaust is an essentially universal phenomenon, this cannot be reduced to a set of specific psychological motives. One would be hard pressed to identify a common set of psychological motives even among Jews, who as a people of many millions are naturally diverse and might find many different motives to become more interested than usual in the subject, if we go beyond mere acceptance. The picture becomes even more complicated when factoring in all the different European and North American nationalities.

It's pretty likely that if you tried to identify the personal motivations of anyone on this thread who accepts the Holocaust as a historical fact, you would guess wrong.

 

[Nick Terry]

I will have to take this up again at a later date. At present I will answer your direct question on the "resettlement" theory before i have to leave off. Hence:

No, with qualifications, because the evidence accessed may not be exhaustive. For example, you speak of "region after region", where "all regions" is required.

I asked firstly specifically about the Ostland. This consisted of four districts, Generalbezirke Estland, Lettland, Litauen and Weissruthenien. In mid-1943 the Ostministerium who had full responsibility for the Ostland stated there were 72,000 Jews left in the Ostland.

It is not difficult to ascertain that the paper trail for both the Ostland as well as the four districts is very extensive, and that all references to Jews in 1943 fit in with the 72,000 figure.

The situation is worse still for the Reichskommissariat Ukraine, since Hitler himself stated in mid-1943 that "the Jews were gone" from the Ukraine, something corroborated by reports from Generalbezirke reporting 'Fehlanzeige' or 'faellt weg' for the Jewish question. There simply were no Jews left in Reichskommissariat Ukraine by 1942, because the Jews registered there in early 1942 had been murdered by late 1942.

My thinking here is (a) the Korherr report figures for deportations up to 1943 are accurate; (b) the extermination camp interpretation is physically impossible; (c) no-one really believes it or they would have done commensurate forensic studies in the intervening 68 years. Hence the Jews must have been deported East, as the German documentation claims (indeed even the "damning" Goebbels diary entry says so).

Your thinking isn't historical, as it is nothing more than a deduction, contradicted by the absence of any evidence to support the deduction. Premise (b) is also disputed; at the very least an honest person would revisit premise (b) once they realised that the conclusion - resettlement to the east - was not substantiated by any meaningful evidence.

As you say, this must have produced documentary evidence, as we are dealing with basically literate societies run by bureaucracies dealing with people with little or no means of livelihood. To establish some reasonable expectations, we might start by considering similar deportations.

For example, what records did the deportation of the Krajina Serbs in the 1990s produce, or the fleeing of Jews from Belgium and the Netherlands to France in 1940, or the expulsion of the Ugandan Asians to the UK in the 1970s? In the case of the Ugandan Asians, there were initial estimates of the numbers sent, but less track was kept thereafter as they merged into the general population and decisions on housing were devolved onto local authorities. In the French case, we find that that many Jews were not included in estimates of French Jewry after the war (so Rassinier, who noted that numbers were only of established congregations, but found information to identify the approximate numbers). These are three cases of deportation on state authority to another established state, but this is not the case here where an occupied territory is involved.

To take a partly similar example of a population movement, you could not calculate the number of illegal immigrants to the UK by looking at DSS figures, as immigrants would not qualify for benefits. Here again, there is a regular state authority in the receiving area and a probably large population movement. I agree the comparison is not exact, but the principle of not recording data outside externally given responsibilities is relevant.

It is also relevant that the receiving authorities in European Russia would be dealing with a large number of migrants arriving over a period of two years in the context of other population flows (people fleeing East to avoid the Germans to being sent East as labour in the Urals factories). Not having an anti-semitic agenda, they would have had no reason to identify arrivals as Jews.

Not one of these situations is at all similar or comparable, but all of them will have generated substantial documentary evidence no matter whether those engaged in expulsions kept copious records or not and no matter whether the migration was voluntary or not. When people are expelled there should be some indicators at the departure point as well as at the arrival point. You seem grossly ignorant of the literature on population migrations and population transfers, which are obviously boom areas of study for the 20th and 21st Centuries.

Comparisons with illegal immigation are spurious, since we're not talking about individual migration but mass collective deportation. But even illegal immigration generates records and evidence, from police arrest reports to surveys by various local, regional and national authorities who can document the scale of such a voluntary migration.

The documentary evidence for deportations of Jews, which you apparently accept, has Jews ordered onto trains which then stop at specific known sites, such as Auschwitz and Treblinka. This was a very organised and directed forced population transfer. The conventional understanding of the end result is of course, a combination of death and enslavement, with the slaves being overwhelmingly employed in the Auschwitz complex under SS control, and much smaller numbers transferred from Sobibor/Treblinka to nearby labour camps under SS control, with none transferred from Belzec or Chelmno. The retention of labourers left documentary traces, of course, as did the extermination.

Leaving aside the conventional understanding, every single population transfer conducted by the Nazis has left a substantial trace in the documentary record, because these mass transfers necessarily involved a considerable logistical effort. Evacuees, deportees and forced labourers have to be housed, fed and put to work. They have to be subjected to some kind of police oversight whichever region they were sent to. A very significant number had to be guarded since the majority were forced population transfers.

The same remarks could be made about Soviet forced population transfers in the same era; these too left substantial paper trails and show that there are common patterns of organising these things. One might add that there is also comparable evidence from the 1940s regarding the Allied handling of population movements, from Displaced Persons to repatriation commissions to the reception of the millions of ethnic Germans expelled from Eastern Europe.

Migrations leave historical traces, ie documents, even when they are voluntary. The fantasy "resettlement thesis" has left zero documentary traces.

You have not established that there are the only two possible hypotheses. Were there no residual local authorities in the occupied territories or amongst the deportees themselves?

Those hypotheses can be ruled out entirely, since the local Estonian/Latvian/Lithuanian/Belorussian authorities were under Nazi oversight, while every district had a Gebietskommissar with a staff along with other Nazi agencies present.

Since the Ostland received 60,000 Jews from the Reich, then we find a big fat paper trail from all the relevant agencies - civilian, military, SS etc - documenting their reactions to the transfers, which were often very negative since they didn't want Jews there at all. The notion that the Nazis would dump Jews onto local collaborator authorities or even allow a mini-Birobidzian without leaving so much as a single trace in all of the documents is completely absurd.

An interesting reference here to "transfers of large numbers of Russian civilians" here!

This was the subject of a full third of my dissertation.

No individual researcher could read "all the files" of a modern society, which it takes an army of bureaucrats to produce. I agree that the resettlement theory needs to be developed, but of course the "normal science" of academia rules it out from the start, so who has the motive and resources to investigate it?

You've unsurprisingly missed the point, again. A small army of researchers has been over the records of the various agencies operating in Nazi-occupied Soviet territory. Historical research is not conducted individually but collectively - the works are rarely co-authored but through the requirement to keep abreast of the literature as well as conferences the endeavour is a collective one.

Whereas 25 years ago the field of researchers into the Nazi occupation of the Soviet Union was a small one, following the end of the Cold War it is utterly enormous. Every single nation state that emerged from the dissolution of the Soviet Union has an active research community, while the number of German historians who have looked at these regions in the past 25 years is staggering; there are also a substantial number of Anglo-American researchers, including myself.

Thus, we are talking about several hundred historians who have been examining the same core files and digging deeper and deeper into local records, for every region of the occupied territories. These historians are of course researching in an era where there is increased attention to the Holocaust, so the chance to discover that even 50,000 Jews ended up transferred by some route to a specific district would be seized on with all alacrity. The existing literature shows that where such transfers did take place, as for example when the Romanians expelled Jews from Transnistria into the Vinnitsa and Zhitomir districts, historians writing about those regions discuss them. The same can obviously be said for all historians of Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Belorussia examining the fate of the 60,000 Reich Jews sent to those regions.

If you try and clutch at straws and assert that hundreds of historians would all share the same collective blindness, this would be a pure desperation move, but it would also be risible, as we are not so homogeneous that we could possibly all be in thrall to a consensus we are busily trying to challenge and revise in order to make a mark and get ourselves noticed. The very nature of the academic profession and its reward mechanisms make it utterly improbable that there could ever be an unconscious conspiracy to overlook something that would have to be screamingly obvious. After nearly 25 years of detailed research in the new era, it would be quite incredible to assert such a thing.

And take it from me, there isn't a conscious conspiracy to suppress the evidence. If you don't believe me, schedule about a year in Washington, DC and start going through the microfilms in NARA. That would be the easiest and quickest way to go through the most relevant files.

My own research into this subject surveyed an entire army group region, one of the six areas in the occupied Soviet territories. Because of transfers from the military zone to the Ostland, I also got to grips with the records of GK Weissruthenien as well as GK Lettland, GK Litauen and the RK Ostland itself. The records I used included supra-regional institutions such as the Wirtschaftsstab Ost and Ostministerium, along with various other OKW and OKH files. They then went down through army group to army and corps/division level for both the rear areas as well as frontline zones. Because of the questions I was asking I looked systematically at the entire economics apparatus, the quartermaster apparatus, the intelligence branch and the SS, and also looked at several other agencies.

These sources, which run to 1000s of files and microfilms - I have genuinely lost count of how many I examined - together amount to a very thorough dragnet of all the phenomena that emerged in that region between 1941 and 1944. Like a fishing net, if something happened that was very small-scale, then yes, I could have missed it. But not a phenomenon that would extend to 100s of 1000s of people.

Since these surviving records are actually quite continuous for the majority of the agencies concerned, there are no gaps in the reporting through which a hypothetical transfer could have descended on the Army Group Centre area. As we are also discussing a hypothetical population transfer that presumably went on for some time and would have presumably left large concentrations of deportees requiring reception, shelter, feeding and guarding, then the implications are even greater. Because if the various agencies did not report on them one month, then over the space of more than two years one would expect them to report on such a phenomenon at least once. Yet they did not.

There was a housing shortage in this region due to war damage and garrisoning of German troops. There were continuous food shortages. There were problems in the labour market which the Army struggled to solve by impressing peasants into non-agricultural labour despite the resulting death spiral for agricultural production. There were shortages of policemen coupled with extensive partisan activity. All factors which were reproduced elsewhere in the occupied Soviet Union. All factors which would have been directly affected by the transfer of whatever portion of the 2 million deportees you care to nominate as reaching this area.

The density of records for the military zone is such that the same conclusion can be reached about the other three army group areas. And indeed, historians have been over those army group regions, usually with several historians examining the same regions from different angles, and thus, citing from the same major series of reports that other historians do.

It is simply absurd to claim that the Wirtschaftsstab Ost, who controlled the economy in both the civilian and military zones, could possibly have overlooked the mass transfer of 2 million Jews to the occupied eastern territories, given the kind of impact such a mass transfer would have to have had. Yet the WiStab Ost reports are continuous - monthly and quarterly and yearly summaries, war diaries and daily activity logs for the chief of the staff and for department heads - throughout the occupation. Since a population transfer on this scale necessarily would impact on he agriculture and labour departments, then the absence of any reference whatsoever to this mass transfer is quite conclusive.

The same exercise can be repeated for all of the non-economic staffs, offering multiple perspectives. Moving this many people is bound to be noticed by someone, and written about. It would have to be written about simply because of the issues it would have created.

You are talking about a number greater than the entire population of Latvia both at this time and today. By the end of 1942 more than 1.5 million Jews had been deported to the extermination camps. That many people would literally have swamped any territory you care to nominate in the occupied eastern territories. Since the deportees were not farmers and had no means of subsistence, they were either left to fend for themselves, or someone fed them.

As it is completely absurd to claim that the Nazis simply let loose 1.5 million of their most hated enemies in the rear areas of their most important front, then your two options - the only two options - are that the Nazis fed them or corralled them in reservations, ghettos or camps. The numbers equate to three full-sized Warsaw ghettos or 30 Belsens.

The more you disperse the deportees, then the greater the expectation that we'd find some documentary evidence. The more you concentrate the deportees, the greater the certainty that they all starved to death.

There is not one trace in the paper trail for the food supply about feeding the 1.5 million deportees by the end of 1942, rising by another half a million or so by the end of 1943, and rising possibly further in 1944 (before you run out of eastern territories as they were liberated, so the Hungarians cause you extreme problems).

Therefore, your fantasy resettlement thesis necessarily and unavoidably means that the Nazis starved the deportees and thus, we would not expect a single survivor of this total non-feeding after even half a year, since human physiology cannot hold out that long without food.

You cannot even tell us whether the Nazis used 3 Warsaw ghettos, 30 Belsens or 300 smaller camps, or took the same numbers and carved out reservations with some territory for possibly growing food, the catch being that any fields or gardens would not produce any food for months on end, thus causing the same total starvation that would be seen in a smaller space. There is not one trace, I repeat, of any food being allotted for the 1.5 million deportees in 1942. Neither emergency relief nor long term ration planning show up anywhere in any economic staff's records.

This is because there simply wasn't a surplus available, and there were enough shortfalls that many existing inhabitants of various regions starved to death. This was especially the case in the larger cities of Ukraine as well as in central Russia. There were drastic shortfalls for all towns and cities in eastern Belorussia.

Under such circumstances, an actual deportation of the Jews to the occupied Soviet territories would have generated between 3 and 5 Warsaw ghettos, 30 to 50 Belsens or 300-500 smaller camps each of which would have been just as much of a hell-hole and even more lethal than the very famous equivalents.

And the Soviets would presumably have started liberating these 3 to 5 Warsaw ghettos, 30 to 50 Belsens or 300-500 smaller camps by the end of 1943 at the latest. So you're telling us the Soviets would have covered that up? They would have delayed gratification and waited a whole year to invent a totally different story with the same outcome, mass death?

Just one Belsen shocked the world in 1945, arguably even more than the reports about mass extermination in the death camps. And you would have the whole world miss 30 to 50 of them...

 

[Natan]

If you don't deny that Generalplan Ost existed at all, what is it that you think it contained? What is it that the Nazis actually planned for the non-German peoples of the East, according to you?

Let's see again what it is ALLEGED to contain:

Russians 50-60% to be physically eliminated and another 15% to be sent to Western Siberia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generalplan_Ost#Civilian_death_toll_in_the_Soviet_Union​

Those percentages are a very specific metric and the ethnic group is also mentioned very specifically. Now we also have:

One principal document which made it possible to recreate with a great deal of accuracy the contents of Generalplan Ost is a memo of April 27, 1942 entitled Stellungnahme und Gedanken zum Generalplan Ost des Reichsführers SS ("Opinion and Ideas Regarding the General Plan for the East of the Reichsführer-SS") and written by Dr. Erich Wetzel, the director of the Central Advisory Office on Questions of Racial Policy of the Nazi Party (Leiter der Hauptstelle Beratungsstelle des Rassenpolitischen Amtes der NSDAP). This memorandum is an elaboration of Generalplan Ost.[5]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generalplan_Ost​

Now a certain poster was kind enough to provide a link to this document. Said poster has sadly - so far at least - been unkind enough to not answer the following rather simple question:

The OP asked for evidence for the planned extermination of slavic people, in specific by Hitler, not Wetzel's thoughts and opinions. I don't give a rat's ass about the Polish. Generalplan Ost was mentioned as proof/evidence. Now is Wetzel's comment correct that the treatment of russians was barely even mentioned in Generalplan Ost, yes or no?

Small reminder:
Damit muß kurz auf die zukünftige Behandlung der Russen, die in dem Generalplan so gut wie gar nicht erwähnt werden, eingegangen werden.

Surprisingly, we do know however that said poster likes straightforward answers:

Do you agree - yes or no? Answer the question straight up without hedging.

There is a vast discrepancy between what is claimed to be in Generalplan Ost (hard figures on the fate of the russians) and what can be shown to be there (next to nothing in the words of Erich Wetzel). THIS is what I claim. I do NOT claim:

1. That there was no Generalplan Ost
2. That the number of slavic people killed is any less than mainstream historians say
3. That Hitler had loving, embracing plans for Slavic people

This has nothing to do with revisionism or denial as some here claim, but about setting some false claims straight. Don't think I'm stupid enough not to have observed no one has so far given a simple answer to a simple question. I am honest enough to admit I'm blatantly wrong in my claim that Poles are not slavic people, but I doubt whether any of you has the intellectual and moral honesty to admit that Generalplan Ost does NOT contain what it is said to contain, at least on wikipedia.

 

[Dcdrac]

Wikipedia is not a credible historical source to say the least, have you actually read the primary sources yourself Simon? or even some secondary sources drawing directly from the primary sources?