It's amazing what happens when one looks at more than one star at a time, like astronomers are supposed to do. One can see the Great Bear, the Plough and Orion's Belt.
As is usual with deniers, this is a rather bad analogy. Astronomers identify constellations; these have various poetic and metaphorical names like the Great Bear etc. Nobody thinks that they really are bears, ploughs or belts.
Historians, meanwhile, typically examine and analyse many sources together, because that is how history is meant to be written, not one-source-at-a-time. However that doesn't mean that some sources decode themselves without requiring an external source to decipher them.
The Hartheim statistics, for example, make no sense internally if one contrasts the 70,000 people it records as 'disinfected' with the savings on food and other costs projected to result from their 'disinfection' over a 10 year period. I cannot see any possible explanation of this source as a whole that can offer a literalist reading of 'disinfected'; there is no known disinfection procedure that reduces patients to a zero-calorie diet, and none that even ensures a permanent reduction in appetite. Accordingly, 'disinfected' in this document is a euphemism.
This has severe consequences for our interpretation of other documents in the Nazi paper trail. Firstly, the fact of euphemism is corroborated by the existence of other documents relating to the euthanasia program which include a Hitler order decreeing the mercy death of incurably ill, and also a document describing the entire procedure at Hartheim (no less) which spells out the method, the use of carbon monoxide in a 'Gasraum'. Other documents corroborate this including briefings to regional officials in 1940 as well as invoices regarding the delivery/return of CO gas cylinders. The use of gas as a killing method is thus proven beyond all reasonable doubt on the basis of contemporary Nazi documents from inside the Nazi regime; there are also other contemporary German sources from outside the regime which confirm this.
Secondly, if the Nazis demonstrably used a euphemism once, then they might well have used euphemisms elsewhere. If they used it in an internal document not meant for publication (as far as anyone can tell), then this tells us something about why they might use euphemisms, not as is often claimed for deception purposes externally, but as part of psychologically distancing them from the consequences of their actions.
As 'disinfected' (desinfiziert) was mostly used non-euphemistically, this also highlights the importance of context. Other terms, too, can be found in use non-euphemistically alongside a euphemistic use. 'Evacuated' or 'resettled', for example, means what it says when people were evacuated from point A to point B and there is a follow-up on the evacuees in the overall paper trail. Where however we might find 'evacuated' or 'resettled' being used intransitively with no reference to
any destination whatsoever, then the context alone indicates a euphemism.
Other terms could become euphemistic due to their sheer vagueness. 'nach dem Osten evakuiert' means nothing whatsoever; the 'East' was so big that the vagueness of the geographical destination betrays a desire to cover up the real destinations, which are mentioned in other sources.
Ditto with Himmler's order to Korherr to say that Jews which were originally reported as subjected to Sonderbehandlung should be described as 'transited to the Russian East'. Again: this is too vague to be credible, and the fact that it is being introduced to replace another euphemism means it too must have been euphemistic. The fact that Sonderbehandlung is replaced by 'the Russian east' means the two terms cannot be equated, as Mattogno would have us believe on a number of occasions.
We can and should however consider other sources when examining documents such as the Korherr report. When the boss-man of the Generalgouvernment has on repeated occasions referred to the destruction of the Jews, and quasi-quoted an exhortation to 'liquidate them yourselves!', and does this not just before the whole thing begins but also in December 1942 as the operation is reaching its high point, then such documents should be taken into consideration; and any interpretation that leaves them out is fundamentally dishonest.
This can be summed up as the principle of total evidence: all relevant evidence must be taken into consideration here. Thus, when a denier waves around the fact that a document about Sobibor calls it a Durchgangslager, and this takes place in correspondence between Himmler and Pohl, firstly all evidence from the two men becomes relevant. So we find Himmler referring to the destruction of the Jews in unmistakable terms a few months later in the Posen speech, and
again in June 1944 at Sonthofen, in both cases in such a way that he meant
killing.
But also all evidence from Sobibor itself is relevant, including all of the prisoner and SS witnesses who worked there. Since all of these 'permanent resident' witnesses describe Sobibor as an extermination camp, then there is an apparent contradiction between one source and many other sources.
This contradiction is easily resolved: the same witnesses who describe extermination say firstly that the camp was set up to deceive the victims into thinking it was a transit camp, and secondly that small contingents of deportees were in fact hived off for work in nearby labour camps
before they underwent the full deception procedure reserved for the victims. By spring 1943 this skimming-off was so widespread that Sobibor was indeed a 'Durchgangslager', for a small minority of the deportees. But these transit prisoners went no further than the Lublin district. Therefore the use of the term Durchgangslager reflects
one reality of the camp, just as Konzentrationslager Auschwitz II was a concentration camp
and an extermination camp.
So what we have found here is that the Nazis could be economical with the truth when it came to designations. This finding is of course substantially reinforced by our observations of numerous other examples where the Nazis used codewords, covernames, or were laconic in their use of terms. Given that this was a world war and militaries
definitely use codewords and euphemisms, then it would be
highly surprising if they avoided using some degree of circumlocution in this case.
This is just spelling out what is fairly obvious to most sentient readers: what amazes me is why deniers like yourself bother to resort to literalist readings of solitary documents and then pretend the designation was present throughout the Nazi documentary record (when it is not), since the literalist reading will immediately collapse when other evidence is brought into the picture.
That is why one-document-at-a-time will always fail, and is completely unhistorical as a method; it is anti-history. It would be anti-history no matter what the topic. It is at best, a form of intellectual childishness suited only for convincing gullible morons drunk on whatever ideological kool-aid they have imbibed.
