All the more reason for you to prove them wrong. You have access to the data. Whats stopping you? Is not the prize uncovering the biggest lie of the 20th century enough incentive for you
Clayton has backed himself into another corner--on 2 counts, the deportations and the camp system. At core, revisionism claims that the gassings didn't take place on the basis of the assertion that there is no direct evidence for gas chambers -- and sometimes that the open air shootings were exaggerated or not directed at Jews or part of the fallout of war. In fact, revisionists generally answer the question "Where then are the Jews, in this case?", that they were deported east. The massive evidence for deportation forces most revisionists to take this position aside from the fact that there is in fact no evidence for it. Revisionists thus handwave away all the evidence for gas chambers and yet concoct a logistically complex scenario for deportations into the deep recesses of the east, during wartime, for which there exists not a scintilla of evidence.
Clayton is different to this, denying much more.
Now, Clayton must realize, the logistically complex and large-scale operation was the deportations, not the operation of the killing camps. In fact, the death camps and killing operations in camps were the tiniest tip of a very large iceberg. The Third Reich operated a growing number of camps of various types during the war years -- 33 Stammlager (main concentration camps), with 1300 subcamps; forced labor camps for foreigners, camps for labor reeducation, transit camps, collection camps, etc. By 1939, on war's eve, the numbers incarcerated in camps within the Nazi system was dropping and had hit 21,400. It was during the war, in fact, the very time at which Clayton claims logistical impossibility, that the camp system grew explosively. By January 1945 almost three quarters of a million people were incarcerated in the various camps and subcamps of the Third Reich--nearly 35 times as many as when the war began. This growth occurred despite frightfully high death rates in the camps. Note to Clayton: This is not about the Jews; it concerns Nazi camps for variously defined offenders, from political enemies to habitual criminals, from asocials to race mixers, from vagrants to ruffians, from Gypsies to gays. Somehow the Germans managed to establish a far-flung camp system, bring into camps 100s of 1000s during the war, and maintain them in the camps despite the material requirements of the war effort.
Yet, according to Clayton, the killing operations were logistically impossible. So, thinking of just the pure killing camps, consider the effort that went into running them as opposed to camps housing inmates indefinitely. On average, each of the 3 Aktion Reinhardt camps had 20-40 German SS officers and noncoms. These had about 100 guards, Ukrainians or ethnic Germans trained at Trawniki. For the 3 camps, then, the total number of overseers and guards was about 450. In 1943, by comparison, the Wehrmacht handed down 2,880 death sentences for soldiers guilty of various infractions. The Aktion Reinhardt camps themselves, we need to remind Clayton, were crude and minimally functional, and built by slave labor
What was logistically and bureaucratically complex was the deportation of 100s of 1000s of Jews to the death camps and to Auschwitz-Birkenau. Contrary to Clayton's insinuations, scholars have dealt with the deportations in great detail. Consider Hilberg alone. The evidence for the deportations -- from railway records to eyewitness -- is massive. Nor was the removal of the Jews and their shipment out of Reich and occupied zones the only instance of Nazi population policy which employed forced population movement, with the efforts and coordination such actions entailed: in fact, during the early occupation of Poland Himmler oversaw a program of forced removals of Poles and Jews and movements west of ethnic Germans. A good source for these logistically demanding operations is Gotz Aly's book,
"Final Solution": Nazi Population Policy and the Murder of the European Jews.
So Clayton Moore will need to deny the war years' camp system and the massive wartime deportations and population engineering of the Nazis in order to sustain his illiterate claim to the logistical impossibility of the mass murder program in the camps.
