Merged General Holocaust denial discussion thread
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Nick Terry
Illuminator
Nowhere in my post did I insult you. I did, however, point out that if you had had historical training you'd realise how silly your question was. This is not an insult, just a statement of fact.
Why do you assume that these issues can be resolved with yes/no answers?
Have you done university-level history courses? Have you read the evidence and the literature?
Why is Gilad Atzmon incapable of reading into the subject properly? Why do so many deniers and their sympathisers ignore the literature?
There's an entire monograph on the evacuation of Auschwitz by Andrzej Strzelecki, available in Polish, German and English.
In my lengthy reply I pointed out there were more than 600 sub-camps in the concentration camp system by January 1945. What makes you think that policy could be uniform or would be uniformly implemented? Some had to be abandoned more rapidly, some were guarded by more panicky SS men. There are dozens of possible reasons. Those reasons would vary by circumstances.
The general trend is, however, pretty clear. In the case of Auschwitz, about 7000 prisoners were left behind while more than twice that number died en route and the remainder were forcibly transferred to other camps. Put that in percentage terms: if there were 67,000 inmates in the Auschwitz complex immediately prior to liberation and 7000 were left behind, only just over 10% were left behind and 90% were not.
No, I'm not banned from CODOH. I've posted similar texts there before, as it happens. Here's another example, running to about 2000 words.
But no, you don't have permission to repost what I wrote there, since I don't have the time to be drawn into a debate on CODOH at the moment. The CODOH crowd will inevitably personalise the discussion, ignoring the fact that I am simply summarising well understood and well researched events. It's not just me saying these things - it's about a hundred different historians, all contributing to a collective picture.
This a public forum by the way. I can just link to it.
Like the Himmler order?
http://www.codoh.com/gcgv/gcstopgas.html
Possible? 60,000 out of 67,000 seems like they did a good job at evacuating. Maybe they did have a choice?
http://en.auschwitz.org.pl/h/index....ew&id=16&Itemid=99999999&limit=1&limitstart=1
What are fortunate coincidences?
Are you aware of any accounts from Germans during the Auschwitz liberation? What did they have to say about it?
TSR
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How many of those Japanese-Americans disappeared after being sent to the internments camps?
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... because you haven't bothered to really look into what happened to people there.
It's not "emotional" to point out the facts that I have, but if you'd care to take the subject up in the General thread, from which you ran, I'm more than willing.
His fate there can be inferred, you just refuse to acknowledge the fact.
So, we are agreed that Henio did not deserve being sent either to the ghetto or the camp.
Why was he, then?
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What's the point of these questions? You know the answer. It was anti-semitic.
Inferred? You talking conspiracy theory now? You have proof? No you don't. Good chance Henio has probably died at this point, but we don't know how. You can infer or guess all you want though.
I didn't run. That general thread ran it's course in my eyes. It's completely unwieldy to get into anymore detail in a single thread. There has been other Holocaust threads going into 100+ pages and I'm not interested in dealing with that.
This is a specific topic and a good one therefore I find interest in posting in it. You should stop continuing to derail it.
Nick Terry
Illuminator
Of course you can. You asked me if you could repost what I wrote, obviously I can't stop you, but it would be somewhat sleazy to do so.
Has it ever occurred to you that the majority of written information produced by humanity does not survive? And that therefore it is commonly accepted practice to use a combination of inference and other sources (in this case later testimonies plus contemporary letters indirectly referring to the same decision) in order to arrive at a reasoned historical explanation?
And that therefore, negationist handwaving about 'no document x' is utterly futile since it fails to follow the conventionally accepted rules of historical methodology?
If you have trouble decoding why anyone might say it was a fortunate coincidence that some prisoners were not death-marched out of Auschwitz, I suggest you attend a remedial ethics class.
Yeah, actually, loads. A number are included in Strzelecki and some contemporary documents on the overall evacuation of the Kattowitz district are even facsimiled there. There were many trials and investigations regarding the death marches from Auschwitz, so there's even more evidence. Generally the shootings are well documented en route because the Nazis did not have time to cover up their crimes; the death marches left trails of communal and mass graves in their wake which could all be exhumed immediately after the war.
Why do you expect me to be your research bitch? Just admit your gross ignorance of the subject and move on. Or go away and read a book, then come back and debate the subject properly.
TSR
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No, not conspiracy *theory*.
Conspiracy *fact*.
English is not your first language, so you're forgiven this leap.
inferred
1. To conclude from evidence or premises.
The evidence was presented in the various court cases against the perpetrators.
He went there. Fact. He had done nothing to personally deserve it. Fact. Mass murder was committed against civilians there. Fact. Henio was never heard from again. Fact. Pretty much nothing was done by Nazis by in Nazi controlled territory that was not understood to have been authorized by Hitler. Fact. No one was ever punished by the Nazis for these mass murders. Fact.
Inference: Henio was killed there.
Further inference, there was at least a state policy authorizing it.
Further inference, the Holocaust, as regards Majdanek, happened as has been reliably recorded by generations of historians.
Care to dispute any of this?
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It's your claim he's misquoting out of context. That is what you are required to support or admit you're a liar.
Then he's missing.
Chaos. Devastation. The largest movement of populations that Europe had experienced probably at any time in recorded history.
To have been born into a family that was too ignorant, lazy, or uncaring to search for him after the war? Nothing. Nothing at all. What did Prince Charles do to deserve being born the next King of England? Life isn't fair.
TheRedWorm
I AM the Red Worm!
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You are a disingenuous coward.
Ok just quick, but the Strzelecki quote was referring to being eliminated on the spot and not sent on a death march.
"The SS intended to eliminate these prisoners, and only fortunate coincidences prevented them from doing so."
This is why a general holocaust thread doesn't work. You can make a whole thread just about the Himmler order. The CODOH article mentioned other testimonies like Becher. I'm not interested in pursuing this further here because it's going to get way out of hand and it's not fun going through a 100 page thread. I would consider going to RODOH, but the forum is so ugly and your people are so juvenille with their name-calling that I find it unappealing. I don't know why you, a professor, bothers to even post here though and then claim you don't have time to post on CODOH. I would ask the same questions here or there. CODOH is just better for that because the forum is entirely dedicated to the Holocaust and you are able to pursue individual points without the jeering crowd from a place like JREF.
Have you posted about the Himmler order at CODOH? We can start with that. You obviously have the time to post so I like to see you expand on that. A more detailed response to that CODOH article. Is there a response or article on the Holocaust blog? How would you respond to CODOH about the Himmler order?
I don't think you can nominate TSR for a stundie based upon my paraphrasing/synthesizing his numerous comments about statements of fact emerging from the IMT and other trials.
Matthew Ellard
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Perhaps that CODOH thread where a holocaust denier asked the question "Why don't we have any evidence were the Jews were all sent in the east?" Not one person answered his question other than with abuse. So much for CODOH's free exchange of information.
Why don't you send Bradley Smith, who runs CODOH, an email and ask him if he has ever read a "Krege Report". I got one of my holocaust deniers, from the Skeptic Society forum, to do this.........Bradley responded that he didn't understand the question........tsk tsk tsk......so much for open debate on the holocaust at CODOH. CODOH will be closing soon anyway. Bradley's little jaunt to Iran to host a conference for Ahmadinejad didn't impress some of his right-wing contributors.
http://www.nemw.net/pdf/codoh/Apersonalappeal.pdf
Well you and others like Nick Terry are capable of posting if you wanted. Holocaust discussions aren't even allowed in some places.
Believers say that the evidence is destroyed or that the absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence and that there is a convergence of evidence. There are rhetorical questions being used for the Holocaust.
They've talked about the Krege report so I don't understand your point. My understanding is that it has not been officially published so I find it to be a fair criticism.
RODOH is using a crappy free software which is the only reason it's up. Who would donate to that crap.
Roberto Muehlenkamp, Nick Terry, and Sergey Romanov BITCH SLAPPED AGAIN!
http://hateblogwatch.yuku.com/topic/232/Roberto-Muehlenkamp-Nick-Terry--Sergey-Romanov-BITCH-SLAPPED
Nick Terry
Illuminator
Already answered - circumstances varied. If an SS contingent guarding a particular camp had orders to evacuate the able bodied inmates and kill those who could not march, and only a certain amount of time to do both these things in before the camp was liberated, then depending on how fearful they were of the enemy and on their discipline, efficiency, ideological commitment etc, this would determine whether they actually carried out both orders. At some point they would have to prioritise. The Auschwitz complex was, after all, evacuated in rather a hurry, and the SS were not robots.
All this should be blindingly obvious if you actually sat down and thought about it for a minute.
It's very touching, it really is, that you've not noticed how rigged debate is at CODOH. The moderator, Hannover, routinely deletes informative posts made by non-revisionists. Accordingly few non-deniers want to go on there to make posts that may simply vanish, and it's not conducive to free-flowing discussion if you
The other problem with CODOH's rigged rules is the 'one topic per thread' rule. Your idea of reposting my lengthier reply on there is a non-starter because Hannover would eventually decide once discussion unfolded that it was 'discussing too many topics' in one thread, whereas he likes to keep his thinking simplistic and focused on only one issue.
Of course, when it suits him, Hannover changes the subject. So the last time I posted at CODOH was on a thread about cremation, and then Hannover started in with his jeering and challenges about gas chambers, which by CODOH's own rules would be 'off-topic'.
Recently, Hannover deleted an entire 50-post thread because it 'dealt with too many subjects', then deleted subsequent protests from revisionists to reinstate the thread as a locked thread, he either suspended the protesting revisionist or drove them off so they haven't posted since. The thread starter, who is best described as a fence-sitter, was also silenced.
This happens so routinely that denying it would be futile.
Evidently, the powers that be in the revisionist scene, most especially Bradley Smith who runs CODOH, don't care that by rigging their forum in this manner, they make a mockery of the Open Debate part of the CODOH name and also demonstrate that revisionists are incapable of joined-up thinking.
So yes, when it comes to posting at CODOH and JREF then I don't have time currently to do both, because posting at CODOH requires that one save whatever one might write, lest it vanish down the memory hole.
There was a general Holocaust type thread that got deleted that I remember. I'm not sure if that is what you are referring to. I do understand that there is some censorship and that is unfortunate, but there is still a good deal of information there. I think it's a good thing to keep to a single topic unless you really feel one giant massive thread running hundreds of pages is actually a good idea. I've looked at RODOH a couple times, but there is so much fluff or crap all over like here that I just can't stand it. I just like the JREF forum software mostly.
I'm still all ears regarding the Himmler order.
Nick Terry
Illuminator
No, they're not rhetorical questions.
If you had any familiarity with the historical disciplines whether in science, social science or the humanities, then you'll know that the overwhelming majority of information about the past is destroyed due to the ravages of time. Yet this has not stopped scientists and scholars reconstructing the past. Geologists can tell us about past cataclysms and upheavals from teh traces left in rocks. Palaentologists can tell us about extinct species from fossils. Linguistics can reconstruct dead languages, philology can reconstruct missing texts, archaeology can reconstruct entire civilisations from potsherds, and historians can reconstruct past events using a variety of types of evidence.
The main rule of thumb in history is that evidence closest to the events is preferable. That does not mean that later evidence is dismissed, it simply means that depending on what one is asking then one may be forced to rely on other types of evidence. Most of all, it depends on what information has survived and been handed down to us.
Our knowledge of the Peloponnesian War is almost entirely derived from a single source, Thucydides. Archaeology cannot corroborate most of the events described in his account, and there are really few other written sources to do the same thing. There is unsurprisingly a great amount of disagreement over whether one can rely on Thucydides. But few would handwave away the entire account and dismiss the Peloponnesian War as a figment of his imagination. It does, after all, help us explain the rise of Athens in ancient Greece, which left other evidence and thus 'fits' with our expectations. We also have Herodotus writing in the period immediately beforehand. But we don't have a comparable account to Thucydides written by a Spartan.
That is an extreme example, but we also have more recent ones such as the destruction of virtually all Imperial German Army military records in 1945 by an RAF raid on Potsdam, which also wiped out much of the WWII Luftwaffe's records. In between 1918 and 1945, German military historians had written extensively on WWI using the now destroyed records. We do possess surviving collections of WWI German military records from state armies (Bavaria etc) and from captured documents - I have seen WWI documents captured by the British and found them very interesting. But the bulk of the material is gone, forever, and we have to rely extensively on the renditions of this material written up in the 1920s and 1930s by manifestly biased nationalist historians who might well, as citizens of a defeated power, have good motive to lie.
The records generated by the Nazi regime are manifestly incomplete, and the files of many crucial agencies went up in smoke at the end of the war because they were deliberately destroyed by a regime on the brink of defeat. Only a handful of files of the Army's Quartermaster-General survive, the Luftwaffe records are fragmentary, and the main bulk of the records of the Party Chancellery were destroyed although some remain. In the 1980s, historians reconstructed the Party Chancellery's directives and circulars using the files of other agencies.
It is standard practice for military units to destroy files to prevent them falling into the hands of the enemy and thereby glean intelligence from them. Thus, there are very few files relating to the period of the retreat from Moscow since division after division reported in a later war diary period that they burned their intelligence department files or operational files during the retreat.
Much of the destruction was entirely deliberate and designed to cover up what the regime had done. And thus it is no surprise that the SS and Police records in particular are highly incomplete. There are only a handful of war diaries of individual police companies or police battalions extant, yet the Nazis fielded more than 100 police battalions. From other files you can often reconstruct what they did, but not always. The records of the concentration camps are similarly fragmentary. We have relatively complete sets for some camps, and virtually nothing for other camps.
Under these circumstances, insisting that something only happened if there is a contemporary Nazi document recording it would be a violation of every maxim and principle used in any historical discipline. It would be like insisting that dinosaurs existed only if an intact dinosaur could be found, instead of fossil bones.
However, there are enough records surviving that we can reconstruct and write the history of the Nazi regime to a level of detail which would make medievalists and many early modernists cry. Indeed, there is more written evidence available for the Holocaust than we are ever likely to see regarding many other mass exterminations in modern history, since the genocidal regimes in question destroyed many of their records, too.
Moreover, the records that do survive permit us to assert with great certainty what happened. We do not need an extant Hitler order to say that Hitler ordered the extermination of the Jews if we have numerous documents from Himmler and other leading Nazis referring to a Hitler order, and many statements from Hitler right through to his Political Testament which corroborate this and disprove the claim that Hitler hadn't known. The sum total of pieces of contemporary written evidence relating to a Hitler order is in the many hundreds. They might leave us uncertain precisely when an order was given, but they narrow the possibilities to within a very tolerable time-frame. Especially when contrasted with other evidence showing how policy was implemented.
Likewise, we do not need an extant Himmler order decreeing a stop to the gassings at Auschwitz to comprehend what happened at Auschwitz in the autumn of 1944. Transport and camp records indicate that there were no more selections upon arrival after the end of October 1944, and that there were no more mass selections inside the camp after the same date. Contemporary letters from SS doctors working at Auschwitz report their jubiliation that the whole nasty mess (I am paraphrasing) had been ended on the orders of Berlin.
Those sources, all of which are written contemporary documents, are sufficient to infer an order to stop gassing. One can infer who might have given the order by paying attention to the chain of command. Consilience alone would help identify the most probable candidate in the absence of any other evidence - most notably, the precedents of other similar orders on fairly important issues. Logically, a stop order could have been given by the camp commandant, by Gluecks at Amtsgruppe D, by Pohl at the WVHA, by Himmler or by Hitler. It is just about plausible that the RSHA hierarchy was involved, from Eichmann through to Mueller to Kaltenbrunner to Himmler. But even though the RSHA was heavily involved in the camps through the camp political departments and also organised transports to Auschwitz, it was not responsible for selections inside the camp, which were the province of the camp commandant's staff and the medical department. So it's more likely the camp-Amtsgruppe D-WVHA-Himmler hierarchy. And we can justifiably assume that most major decisions would have been taken higher up. So Himmler is very much the most probable candidate even in the absence of any other evidence. Pohl might have actually issued the order, but it's unlikely that he would have done so without some discussion with Himmler. And Pohl had a track record of issuing orders signed by him which began 'on the orders of the Reichsfuehrer SS', which was a typical Nazi practice found with Hitler and other leading Nazi figures.
So when we encounter testimonial evidence given immediately after the war that Himmler had indeed issued a stop order, this corroborates the already existing most probable interpretation of the "facts on the ground". In turn, other postwar testimonial evidence from inside Auschwitz corroborates the interpretation, since the staff and inmates at Auschwitz confirm that all of a sudden, selections stopped and the gas chambers began to be dismantled. By December 1944 we even have contemporary written evidence of a dismantling kommando assigned to tear down the crematoria. Was that decision taken locally? Could have been, but it doesn't seen very probable given all of the other evidence.
And it's the "all of the other evidence" bit which is important. Historians are not meant to dismiss entire categories of evidence just because cranks think that only certain types of evidence count. They are routinely confronted by situations where no such evidence would ever have existed, or where it is known that evidence of a particular type which did exist, has been destroyed. Much of human history can only be known through evidence which is no different, indeed often far worse, than 1945-46 affidavits by leading Nazis.
If we had no postwar affidavit from Becher about a Himmler stop order, we would still be able to say, 'gassings at Auschwitz stopped, most probably on the orders of Himmler' (see: letter by Wirths, evidence of transports, testimonies of other SS men at Auschwitz etc). We might then have to rely on other later witnesses who confirmed the same point, to change the "most probably" to a reasonable certainty. (And note that the identity of who precisely ordered a stop to gassing is an entirely subsidiary issue - the evidence indicates gassings stopped, period.)
In such a situation - and I repeat, historical disciplines encounter them almost every day - then there will always be a residual element of uncertainty. But, and this is the other part that cranks never understand, you then have to reassess and reevaluate all of the relevant evidence, and produce a better explanation of all the evidence. This is the principle known in philosophy as inference to the best explanation, sometimes as abduction, and the historical disciplines have to practice both so often they are one of the hallmarks of such disciplines. Historical dsiciplines, after all, cannot observe the past through an electron microscope, but only through the traces left by the past.
All this just sums up what is virtually instinctive to anyone who has training in a historical discipline.
I am interested in making a thread about this on CODOH. I would also be interested in hearing more from you about this Himmler order.
Wroclaw
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Nobody wants to go debate on CODOH where, if a Holocaust denier is bested in debate, that person is then censored and banned.
You can stay here or go back to that circle-jerk you call a forum. Your choice.
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