If the answer you gave is the final answer, Auschwitz was not officially acknowledged to have been significantly modified until the 1980s, any modification done under the communist regime isn't relevant, and the first time researchers from the western side of the iron curtain were able to access the site independent of the communist authorities was 1988. And this in no way limits the historiography of Auschwitz. If that's what you believe, you should at least try to say it in a way that doesn't sound as pathetic as the way I say it.
But if that's your answer or simply don't like Auschwitz anymore, let's talk about the rest of Europe that ended up in Soviet hands. When did the west gain access to those regions in the east that are important to the holocaust story? For example, when were westerners allowed to physically inspect the sites where the EG had been operating? How much of the documentary evidence we have for the EG was provided to western scholars by the Soviets and how much of it was discovered by researchers on the western side of the iron curtain independent of the Soviets?
These are the more interesting questions.
You are still arm-flapping. It is rather telling that you are virtually incapable of writing a post without asking endless questions. If you have a serious case to make, please
state it, remembering to back up your assertions and check the facts. If you think that site access is some kind of major issue,
please explain why it matters. In previous posts you reacted like a scalded cat when asked to explain the hoax, but what we have here is conspiracy lite, a bunch of extremely vague insinuations that don't actually
go anywhere, especially not if they're reduced to 'oh the East Bloc is sinister'.
I cannot promise that this will answer all your questions, but I previously wrote a short essay about the provenance of the Einsatzgruppen reports
which is on the Holocaust History Project website.
Issues of provenance and investigation become increasingly moot after 1949 or so, for the simple reason that so much was investigated and discovered by that date. That's why the Holocaust became a historical fact and an accepted part of reality in the 1940s.
It's precisely because there were separate but parallel investigative endeavours on both sides of the Iron Curtain that we can be quite confident there was no grand-scale fabrication.
The Western allies had most of the documents and a lot of the witnesses and the perpetrators, in addition to accessing the sites which fell on their side of the Iron Curtain (eg Hartheim, Mauthausen - places with gas chambers). Poland and the Soviet Union had the physical sites, a lot of documents, and a great many witnesses. Every single country in Europe which had been occupied by the Nazis was running an investigation of some kind into what had happened during the war. The results matched, and they were independent of each other. Some of the results were publicised, and quite a lot not, as we see with the Soviet Extraordinary Commission reports. The varying degrees of publicity means we can look back and find other examples of independent corroboration which were not known in the 1940s, when the world decided that the Nazis had indeed mass-murdered the Jews of Europe.
Just as there is the problem to explain what really happened to the Jews from 1942-45, you also have the problem of explaining the investigations of 1945-49, before you even get to the issues you think are oh-so-crucial. Droning on about when-did-the-west-get-to-see-the-crematorium has completely missed the bus by several decades.
But something you wrote above piqued my curiousity: Why do we have this documentation that clearly refers to the Nazi's intentional extermination of the Jews and precisely records the numbers of Jews, broken down by sex and age, who were shot but we don't have similar documentation for those Jews who were gassed? I understand that the exact policy and the methods used to accomplish the goal of total extermination of the Jewish population evolved over time. But shooting and gassing were carried out in parallel through 1942 and 1943. In the Nazi mind, shooting and gassing were simply methods that led to the same result, dead people. Why track one and not the other?
I'm quite sure I've made points about this to you before. There were a very large number of units involved in mass shootings. Not all of their reports survive, but a significant number do. We don't have anything like the Jaeger report for any of the other 15 Sonder- and Einsatzkommandos, with that level of detail. We have more sporadically detailed reports breaking down victims by sex and age. It isn't very likely that all of the units would have headcounted their victims as precisely as EK 3. Nor is it very likely that such headcounts would survive for the extermination camps, given the described conditions upon arrival at many of them.
There were really only five 'big' extermination camps, of which four were run by company-sized units. You're talking about more than 100 company sized units operating in 1941 in the Soviet Union killing Jews; and we have war diaries for a couple of them at best. It's a matter of simple common-sense to realise that more documentation for the mass shootings ought to survive than would be the case for five extermination camps, three of which were entirely shut down in 1943.
Before we go on:
do you accept that common sense or not? If not why not?
That said, we do have quite a bit of information which is comparable. Deportation lists help calculate age and gender breakdowns. Not only are they available for western and central Europe, but there is a lot of similiar data from the Lodz ghetto relevant to Chelmno, in addition to that deeply inconvenient document from June 1942 which states that 97,000 had been processed in gas vans.
There are also four Jaeger-like reports on the reception of transports to Auschwitz, breaking down the number of men, women and children deported, the number of men and women registered, and the number who were subjected to special treatment or were 'specially accomodated'. Four survive, whereas there were hundreds of transports to Auschwitz. The obvious conclusion is that the rest were lost because the SS destroyed them, and overlooked the four that survive in another department's files.
We can document the fact of arrival at Auschwitz of many more transports with their full complements of deportees. BdS Frankreich sent a stream of telexes saying a transport is on its way with 1112 or 1002 Jews from Drancy and will arrive in Auschwitz on x day. The transport lists for France are preserved, so we have the age breakdowns. The numbers of men and women registered at Auschwitz from those transports are known from a master list of registration numbers. This is confirmed by several hundred survivors who carried the relevant tattoo numbers on their arms until they died. It is utterly irrefutable that those transports arrived in Auschwitz, based on all the sources.
And then there are the rather precise contingent who don't get registered.
You know all this, or you really ought to by now; what is your point?
