The Jews Went to Work? Organization Todt

[Callafangers]

Your claim that millions of Jews were not killed

My "claim" is that you have not evidenced millions of Jews being killed. You make an extraordinary claim, you lack extraordinary evidence -- that is where our debate resides, with you continuously striving to shift that burden onto your opponents.

[Callafangers]

Please list your evidence of mass departures back out of the AR camps. Regarding that evidence;

"To be completely clear, here's what is needed from you:
For any figures you cite, indicate the original source(s) for the figure and express how and why you find them to be a necessary reflection of actual events (and not based on motives or opportunism).
When there have been (or potentially have been) multiple hands along the chain of custody of any sources/reports provided, conduct the same review (checking for potential motives/opportunism) for each 'link' in that chain."

Thanks.

Hmm this seems to put a burden on me, Nessie, one which isn't mine. I don't have the burden of proof to prove Jews did not get killed -- you have the burden to prove they necessarily did.

Do you? Because if you claim to, you're going to need to show evidence other than "Germany's enemies said so".

[Nessie]

Your claim that millions of Jews were not killed

My "claim" is that you have not evidenced millions of Jews being killed. You make an extraordinary claim, you lack extraordinary evidence -- that is where our debate resides, with you continuously striving to shift that burden onto your opponents.

You get shown a ton of evidence, from archaeological remains, to eyewitness statements, to documents recording huge drops in the Jewish population and you just dismiss it as a massive conspiracy, which is an extraordinary claim, you then dodge, because you know you cannot evidence it.

Unlike you, I know what to do. For example, if the extraordinary claim was made that the British were gassing tens of thousands of interred German, Austrian and Italians on the Isle of Man, I would know how to investigate that claim and establish it was not true. You would not. You would merely dispute the evidence of gassing, arguing it was physically impossible and all the witnesses lied, as you do with the Nazi gassing claims. I would gather evidence by taking statements from prisoners and staff, visiting the locations of the alleged gas chambers and have them examined and search archives for documents. In my scenario, I know that both camp staff and internees would deny gas chambers existed, the forensic search would find nothing and documents would prove that the vast majority of internees who arrived on the island, subsequently left. I would have used evidence, not argument, to prove no gassings. You cannot do that, which is a failure on your part.

You are not interested in a genuine, evidence led investigation, as you know you have no evidence of millions of Jews still alive in 1944.

[Callafangers]

You get shown a ton of evidence, from archaeological remains, to eyewitness statements, to documents recording huge drops in the Jewish population and you just dismiss it as a massive conspiracy, which is an extraordinary claim, you then dodge, because you know you cannot evidence it.

No -- once again, you can't seem to get off the ground with a single paragraph without attempts to shift the burden. Nessie, the corpses you need to be there are simply not. Do you understand the difference between 1,000 corpses or even 10,000, versus 800,000? These are not the same event, not the same crime, not the same anything, unless your 800,000 corpses (or damned near it) are actually there.

You have people claiming they are there... but these people have overwhelming conflicts of interest. Thus, characteristically and even categorically, these claims can be largely dismissed.

Thus, since you also lack verifiable, contemporary documentation substantiating your claims, you remain at square one.

Everything else beyond this fact is simply you raging and seething about it.

[SanityCheck]

[...]

Sir, do you mind if I ask you a couple questions before we take a long stroll down this path you just laid out here?

One thing I want to ask you is, were jews indeed 'sheep dipped' into OT during Barbarossa? I remind you of the Yad Vashim article covering this I linked on page 10. Now, given this proven example, do you think it is reasonable to entertain the idea that this program was broader than that, and to look for evidence of such?

One case in 1941. Jews from the Lodz ghetto were taken out in spring 1941 for work outside the ghetto in large numbers, some were sent to Danzig-Westpreussen. From there a contingent was taken by a construction firm to Lithuania. The survivors were encountered by native Jews, so showed up in e.g. the diary of Eliezer Yerushalmi in Siauliai/Schaulen, Abraham Tory in Kovno and Herman Kruk in Vilna.

The most solid observations of this group were from an OT camp of Baugruppe Giesler in Palemonas near Kaunas, since 150 Jews from Kovno ghetto were sent there in September 1942, this is documented in the Kovno ghetto Judenrat records. Witnesses from Kovno who returned from this 'Aussenarbeit' said there were 300 Polish Jews who had been brought east in late summer 1941. Two of these Jews, from Lodz, escaped to the Siauliai/Schaulen ghetto in the summer of 1942 and explained they had first worked near Danzig and then been brought to Lithuania.

Source synthesising these sources: Dieckmann, Deutsche Besatzungspolitik in Litauen, pp.1091-2. Wolf Gruner in his Jewish Forced Labor under the Nazis has more on the spring 1941 assignments of Lodz ghetto Jews, including to the camps of the Reichsautobahnn in the annexed territories of western Poland, also noting some sent to Danzig-Westpreussen

The second case is January 1942. In Upper East Silesia a contingent of Jewish workers were put together by the OT and sent in January 1942 - slowly due to the transport logjam - to Army Group North to work on regauging the railways. They were moved around and evidently suffered losses from the cold and mistreatment, but not a really extreme mistreatment. Then by mid-1942 they were returned to Silesia and the Schmelt camps.

Sources: Summary of German Police Decodes 16.12.41-15.1.42, 14.2.1942, MSGP 32, pp. 10-11, TNA HW 16/6 pt.1; Kruk, The last days of the Jerusalem of Lithuania, 187 (30.1.1942) noted the passage of the transport through Vilnius; Gustaw Ickowicz, Lb. 34, 3.1945, YVA O.62/31; departure and return also noted in Hans Wollenberg, …Und der Alptraum wurde zum Alltag. Autobiographischer Bericht eines Jüdischen Arztes über NS-ZAL in Schlesien (1942-1945) (Pfaffenweiler: Centaurus, 1992), 66-7. The reconstruction of this action by Bella Guttermann, ‘Jews in the Service of Organisation Todt in the Occupied Soviet Territories October 1941-March 1942’, Yad Vashem Studies XXIX (2001), 65-107, misdates the departure to late 1941, which is contradicted by the sources cited here.

So both cases known hitherto preceded any deportations to Chelmno and Birkenau respectively.

These would have been 'OT-Einsatz II' before the establishment of the OT-Einsatzgruppen. They would have involved German construction staffs and firms.

Polish construction firms from the GG were certainly contracted for the OT further east, but there's no evidence hitherto that they were employing Jewish labour, the construction offices in the GG which did employ Jews evidently contracted to German firms.

Another question I have for you is, do you have a 'hard' estimate for the dead at the Bug River camps? Looking at the studies conducted over the years, it looks like the grave space will accommodate roughly 10% of the claim, at each camp.

I disagree with 10%, you are lowballing the capacity of the graves as a cope.

My last question is with regard to the 'calorie crunch' after the Soviet slash and burn during their withdrawal and in the ensuing couple of years. Now, would this scenario be the same as 'the preplanned genocide of the jews of Europe'? Or would that scenario be seen as a more pragmatic approach to a resource problem? I also want to know if the coming pivot here is to say 'the nazis planned this famine because they hated slavs'. I think that's where this line of attack usually goes.

In my eye, the 'calorie crunch' argument is the one trotted out when the 'it was a preplanned' genocide' argument falls flat. Then the argument gets bullnosed back to 'it was preplanned genocide' but this time through the 'starvation plan'.

The 'hunger strategy' has been known from key documents since IMT Nuremberg. It was obviously emphasised by German historians like Christian Streit when examining the treatment of Soviet POWs in Keine Kameraden (1978). Streit went on to query the Ohlendorf pre-Barbarossa extermination order claim in the early 1980s so was part of the effort shifting the consensus away from this, which is the only 'pre-planned genocide' claim around. So that was basically dismissed forty years ago.

The 1980s and 1990s saw a general incorporation of German planning for Barbarossa into discussions of the Final Solution, both the Generalplan Ost and 'Hunger Plan'. These themes are not quite as prominent in Hilberg 1961, but are quite obvious in Browning/Origins (2004) and Longerich, Holocaust (2010), whose German edition appeared in 1998.

Both the GPO and 'hunger strategy' envisaged population reductions through expulsions to Siberia and deaths of 20-30 million people. Himmler was informed via Backe and talked to the HSSPFs of 20-30 million deaths before Barbarossa. There are many other sources outside the SS about slogans of millions dying, plus Goering talking about the greatest dying off since the Thirty Years War (which halved the population of Germany) to Italian foreign minister Ciano.

Since the agricultural planners proposed reducing the Soviet urban population to the level of 1913 to extract surpluses, the hunger strategy would have affected Jews, a largely urbanised nationality, in the pre-1939 Soviet Union regardless of other considerations. The annexed western borderlands, i.e. the Baltic states, eastern Poland, and Bessarabia-Bukovina, had not seen the same dramatic urbanisation as Soviet Ukraine. They were also agriculturally more productive in many cases. The Jews of the Baltic states were however eliminated while these areas served as the supply base for Army Group North, which was besieging Leningrad with a very underpopulated and unfertile hinterland (lots of forests and swamps).

The countervailing pressure was labour requirements, specifically skilled labour. Two areas/towns in the western borderlands exemplify this, firstly the Drohobycz-Boryslaw oilfields in Galicia. Jews were found to be a large part of the existing skilled workforce there, so this specific workforce had to be protected, and while most Jews from these towns were deported or killed over 1942-3, this was the sole big concentration of surviving Jewish forced labour in Galicia to the spring of 1944. The other was Siauliai/Schaulen, where there were two of the largest leather factories in Europe. Random arrests and killings in July 1941 were stopped because of the intervention of the military economic staffs. Even though the core Jewish workforces in these factories was small, the intervention meant that a far higher proportion of Jews in Siauliai survived 1941. At the start of 1941, there were 6,400 Jews in a town of 32,000, with refugees also arriving. In November 1941 after the last actions and after some provincial Jews were moved in, there were 4,674 Jews counted. This is a much higher percentage of survivors than in Vilnius or Kovno, where demands for skilled labour prevented the total destruction of those ghettos and meant there were workers into 1944. The Lithuanian provinces had fewer critical industries so provincial Jews were seen as superfluous, useless mouths, security threats, Bolsheviks.

By contrast, the industrial cities of the Dnieper bend in Soviet central Ukraine had lost most of their factories to Soviet evacuations, and while the Germans intended to rebuild some and various other projects, the Jews remaining were superfluous and not needed. The same in Kharkiv where 10,000 Jews were insignificant compared to the number of unemployed Ukrainian workers who could be sent west as Ostarbeiter, while local labour demands rose, and more starved to death in the city than there were Jews. Being at the bottom of the racial hierarchy meant they were slated for death in this specific context. Kyiv faced starvation in 1941-2 as well, but the remaining Jews had all been killed in a nominal reprisal at the very start of the occupation.

About 1 million Jews survived 1941 in eastern Poland; about 200,000 had been killed there in 1941, including 33,000 in formerly Polish Wilno. Survival was partly down to the economic structure, with Jews forming a very high proportion of artisans and other workers, partly due to the division between occupation regions - the Bialystok district was annexed to the Reich - and partly due to the shortage of SS-Police forces across these regions, especially in GK Wolhynien. Even at the end of 1942, there were still large ghettos remaining in the Bialystok district, 161,000 Jews in Galicia, and ghettos in Wilno, Oszmiana, Lida, Glebokie and camp-ghettos in Baranovichi and a few other places. Only GK Wolhynien had been largely cleared of Jews due to this being an agrarian province with heavy quotas imposed. There was one small work-ghetto left, none in the Belarusian northern part.

The way you see the German mind, soul and people is radically different than the way I see them.

Oradour, Malmedy, Ardeatine Caves, Klissura, Serbia, Lidice, T4 - Hartheim, Grafeneck, Hadamar, Bernburg, Brandeburg, Sonnenstein, several settlements named Borki in Belarus wiped out with their entire populations, the Ochota and Wola massacres in the 1944 Warsaw Uprising... the list goes on.

But so does the list of Germans who were horrified by this, who also tried to save lives and shelter non-Jews and Jews where possible: Major Plagge and Anton Schmid in Vilnius, Berthold Beitz in Drohobycz (future director of Krupp postwar), Oskar Schindler in Krakow, Josef Meyer and his family in Zloczow, Galicia, and many more.

The Holocaust was a coalition act of violence. Croatians, Romanians, Hungarians all killed Jews in varying numbers on their own, Lithuanians killed the majority of Lithuanian Jews under German direction, there were collaborator forces like the Arajs Kommando in Latvia, and Estonian and Latvian Security Police sent to Belarus. Belarusian, Polish, Russian, Ukrainian local police became caught up in the actions and manhunts. Ukrainian POWs were recruited to the Trawnikis and formed the bulk of manpower at the Reinhardt camps, and in deportation detachments. The famous Police Battalion 101 delegated the killing of Jewish children to its Trawnikis for a time.

If the T4 personnel could kill 100,000 pscyhiatric patients and KZ inmates in Germany and Austria, then the T4 personnel transferred to the GG together with hundreds of Trawnikis could kill 1.5 million Jews.

If Sonderkommando Lange could 'euthanise' thousands of Polish (and some Polish Jewish) psychiatric patients in the Warthegau, and 1500 from Germany when sent to the Soldau camp, then it could cope with gassing 157,000 Jews and Roma.

It's not difficult to identify other regimes and groups (paramilitaries, militaries, mobs) in the modern era who also resorted to unrelieved slaughter, and perfectly possible to find bad cases in recent American, British, French and Dutch history. I don't think seeing any of this mass violence as unique is helpful or warranted, nor do I think that any nation has an automatic virtue or can avoid descending into such violence under particular circumstances.

The close study of all of these cases might identify widespread factors like racism, in colonial regimes and in the case of the Nazis. But close study also emphasises obedience, camaraderie and other psychological factors. It's beyond reasonable dispute that Nazi Germany was a racist society and structured in that way. Those who helped kill may not have been foaming at the mouth antisemites and did not need to be, they just needed to obey and to cope with a horrible task. Most claimed after the war not to hate Jews - we should take that with pinch of salt due to changed circumstances and potential legal jeopardy. But they had been directed by leaders who ordered the elimination of Polish elites, psychiatric patients and others on a group basis, and who did the same with the Jews. The Nazi leadership were no different to the Bolsheviks, shaped by the First World War and political violence afterwards. Both leaderships could write turgid books and be 'intellectual' and yet also order or demand mass killings. The liberal democracies also didn't shy away from violence in the 'right' circumstances, and all of these powers bombed the shit out of each other if they had the means. Callousness and instrumentalised violence were not unique to the Germans.

[HansHill]

I don't walk away from Dr SC posts laughing my ass off.

I take it back

If the T4 personnel could kill 100,000 pscyhiatric patients and KZ inmates in Germany and Austria, then the T4 personnel transferred to the GG together with hundreds of Trawnikis could kill 1.5 million Jews.

This is a blatantly ridiculous statement.

[Callafangers]

The Nazi leadership were no different to the Bolsheviks, shaped by the First World War and political violence afterwards.

Except the Bolsheviks (Jews, primarily) sought global conquest and the removal of all national borders whereas Germany sought independence and respect for national borders. Bolshevism led to some of the greatest misery for its citizens in history, whereas Germany brought about one of the most prosperous economic turnarounds of all time. One built its structures to align total subservience to the state (and ultimately to Jewry), the other advocated "strength through joy" and upheld its promises to its people.

They are not the same. And given the threat to societies today is far more on the Bolshevism/Jewry side of things, you might want to reconsider your allocation of sympathy. This is not a slippery slope to harming Jewish people (which I think most here including myself have not advocated); it's a wake-up call that a supremacist cult seizing institutions globally (or tacitly enabling those within their tribe who do this) is not your friend, 'Holocaust' or not.

[Nessie]

You get shown a ton of evidence, from archaeological remains, to eyewitness statements, to documents recording huge drops in the Jewish population and you just dismiss it as a massive conspiracy, which is an extraordinary claim, you then dodge, because you know you cannot evidence it.

No -- once again, you can't seem to get off the ground with a single paragraph without attempts to shift the burden. Nessie, the corpses you need to be there are simply not.

That is not true. It is merely your biased opinion. You have zero archaeological or geophysical evidence to support you.

Do you understand the difference between 1,000 corpses or even 10,000, versus 800,000? These are not the same event, not the same crime, not the same anything, unless your 800,000 corpses (or damned near it) are actually there.

You CANNOT quantify how many corpses are there, but you claim there is not c850,000. Fact is, that an area of 2 hectares, up to 7m deep was found to be a mix of earth, ashes and human remains. Geophysics has identified 6 large pits around the memorial, and 3 in the area of the Lazarete, in the areas where witnesses state the main mass graves were located. That fits with the 1944 aerial photo showing disturbed ground and rectangular outlines. You cannot identify a single mass grave site in history, anywhere in the world, that is comparable to that. The only places that come close, are Belzec, Sobibor and Chelmno. In my opinion the disturbed ground at TII can fit c850,000 decomposed, compressed corpses. In your opinion it cannot. I have evidence to support my opinion. You do not, hence you merely dispute the evidence that supports my opinion.

You have people claiming they are there... but these people have overwhelming conflicts of interest. Thus, characteristically and even categorically, these claims can be largely dismissed.

What conflict of interest do the largest group of eyewitnesses have? They are German and Ukrainian SS. It would be in their interest to evidence what did happen, to disprove mass killings. Before you go on about the burden of proof, no one who is accused of murder, who has exculpatory evidence that exonerates them, hides that evidence.

Thus, since you also lack verifiable, contemporary documentation substantiating your claims, you remain at square one.

There is Nazi documentation proving mass transports to the camp, with no corresponding documentation recording mass transports back out again. Documentation around AR proves it was an operation to empty the ghettos and steal all of the personal possessions of the transported Jews, which is consistent with mass murder, not resettlement.

Everything else beyond this fact is simply you raging and seething about it.

It is you seethes about your lack of evidence and my ability to evidence what happened.

[Stubble]

Another question I have for you is, do you have a 'hard' estimate for the dead at the Bug River camps? Looking at the studies conducted over the years, it looks like the grave space will accommodate roughly 10% of the claim, at each camp.

I disagree with 10%, you are lowballing the capacity of the graves as a cope.

What is a 'hard' number here.

With the 'sheep dipping' it appears there are proved up cases. It would appear my omission of judenrat records may have been a misstep. I should fold those in.

With the last bit, the claim is a machinery of genocide carried out in a tight and defined physical area. It is a very specific claim levied against the German people. Antiterrorism, decimations and reprisals are not part of that specific claim and there are historical examples. You chose specifically to point at White examples, but this isn't an exclusively White historical feature. Look at the Haitian Revolution for example.

The 'genocide' claim, specifically involving industrialized killing, is the claim I feel is unfounded. Had this truly been the word of the day, they wouldn't have haphazard put something together in various places and it wouldn't have stopped at 6.

They wouldn't have used hydrogen cyanide gas in an occupied building to dispatched the condemned in a semibasment placed yards from the water treatment plant at Auschwitz Birkenau. They would have used the water, much safer, cheaper and just as efficient.

[Nessie]

...

With the last bit, the claim is a machinery of genocide carried out in a tight and defined physical area. It is a very specific claim levied against the German people...

Not just the German people. Latvians and Lithuanians are accused of joining with the Nazis and shooting their Jewish citizens. Romania and Serbia are accused of running their own genocidal operations. Ukrainians are accused of joining the SS and working at the AR camps. The Dutch are accused of being so cooperative at identifying, registering and arresting Jews, that they had one of the highest death rates. The leader of Norway was so pro-Nazi, that his surname has come to mean a collaborator. All over Europe, people cooperated with the Nazis, against their fellow Jewish citizens. Every single country that was occupied by the Nazis, or aligned to them, lost Jewish citizens, because they were arrested and handed over to the Nazis. They all admit to their roles in the Holocaust. That is every single postwar European government.

Only Denmark and Finland can say that they did not cooperate and they managed to protect the vast majority of their Jewish citizens.

[bombsaway]

I asked you if he was including Poland/ GG as part of "Europe"

I don't know how much ashes there still are at Treblinka, so I wouldn't take that bet. Some accounts say they were move.out of the camp. But that hundreds of thousands were killed there, I'd say 99.999

Either I was not clear or you simply missed my earlier point regarding Korherr. The point is: it doesn't matter whether Korherr considered the GG as part of Europe given that for his accounting purposes, it is clear he considered Jews being 'sifted' (in the GG) as having left Europe.

Regarding your 99.999% certainty, thank you for putting a number on your Dunning-Kruger level of certainty.

Number of 'witnesses' saying gassed Jews were buried on-site at Treblinka? 99%
Number of Jewish corpses that should be at Treblinka? 800,000
Amount of wood that was needed for cremations at Treblinka? some 400,000,000 kg
Amount of corpses' worth of material actually confirmed at Treblinka? Low thousands or tens of thousands at most, even less if we are critical of the excavations and findings (Keen's approach)
Amount of wood that records show was delivered? 0 kg (but let's say 100 kg, for a margin of error)

bombsaway's certainty of 800,000 Jews killed there? 99.999%

Priceless.

Do you know what Dunning Kruger is, I'm clearly not a case of that. I'm not Nick level but I'm far beyond the average lay person in terms of knowledge who would probably also say with high certainty that hundreds of thousands died at Treblinka.

As for whether Korherr considered Poland/GG part of Europe, this is what I was asking about in regards to certainty.

In this thread you said

You're arguing the GG was included as part of Europe according to Korherr but nothing in his report makes this clear. In fact, we see evidence of the contrary (thanks, ChatGPT; some of my own edits as well):

How do you think Korherr defines Europe?

He knows his audience, which means he's speaking on racial terms. And as confirmed above, he regards the GG as distinct from Europe in general.

So Europe is thus "European" states that are primarily Aryan in terms of ethnic makeup?

I don't need to explain this further. It is sufficient to show that Korherr does not appear to include the GG as part of Europe, which is now done and sealed.

You were trying to interpret GG as not being in Europe because then you could argue the Jews never left its geographic vicinity it seems. Just crazy given how unambiguous Korherr is when describing the population drop. They were in Europe, and then they weren't.

[Callafangers]

You were trying to interpret GG as not being in Europe because then you could argue the Jews never left its geographic vicinity it seems. Just crazy given how unambiguous Korherr is when describing the population drop. They were in Europe, and then they weren't.

He describes how they left, bombsaway, and in this description, he indicates this as their being "sifted through the camps in the GG". How they left is that they are being sifted through the camps in the GG.

[SanityCheck]

If you are unable to do this (or even if you don't have this at-the-ready), this speaks volumes to the glaring flaw in your methodology; that is, further confirming that you evade source criticism and disregard chain of custody with all of the 'Holocaust evidence' you collect... which is exactly what some revisionists have been calling you out for all along.

I'm afraid you're missing the point, as usual.

The actions in different countries, ghettos, districts and counties are all described in easily accessible reference works online, including Wikipedia for quite a lot of them, but also USHMM's now open access Encyclopedia, Yad Vashem's Untold Stories for the USSR (1282 towns and settlements, and still growing), and other reference sites. There's a literature stretching back 80 years covering them, and a wealth of now open access sources on them.

Your task is to find out, as a revisionist, whether there is any evidence that each known 'action' was redirected away from the death camps or killing pits near the town. You can go by region if wished, but not by generalising to the point of ignoring the districts/Kreise and municipalities.

This can't be done by subtraction - worrying about the evidence for killing isn't going to prove an alternative, only positive sources for redirection/survival can prove the alternative.

Your task is to be familiar with the conventional account, which exists independently of anyone since it's been crowd-sourced over more than 80 years. It isn't reducible to one website, encyclopedia or what bombsaway or I might say on this forum.

I'd suggest that you might need to start at the beginning - whether 1939 or June 1941 or December 1941 - and see especially if you can explain those early actions and transports, like the Lublin and Lwow ghetto actions in March/April 1942. The other ones later on, well, currently they're generally showing blanks on the leader board for any historical sources pointing to any other outcome, at best you have some risible whoppers like mistaking furniture of Dutch Jews for Dutch Jews themselves.

[SanityCheck]

Another question I have for you is, do you have a 'hard' estimate for the dead at the Bug River camps? Looking at the studies conducted over the years, it looks like the grave space will accommodate roughly 10% of the claim, at each camp.

I disagree with 10%, you are lowballing the capacity of the graves as a cope.

What is a 'hard' number here.

for all intents and purposes, all of them.

There are fuzzy numbers like Jews jumping from trains in large numbers en route to Belzec, some being shot there and then, some later, some surviving; transports observed unloading corpses at Siedlce en route to Treblinka, the selections for Treblinka I, reports of masses of bodies in between Malkinia and Treblinka from break out attempts which were buried who knows where, early start to cremation at Sobibor, the 'Lazarett' already incinerating a small percentage of new arrivals at Treblinka in autumn 1942, documents which if the place name is correct indicate 2000 workers at Belzec in early 1943, the work crews in other camps, escapes from the camps.... enough to knock some percentage points off the Hoefle figures, how many is almost impossible to say.

If you think 90% passed through then some evidence beyond the exceptions noted above is really, really needed.

With the 'sheep dipping' it appears there are proved up cases. It would appear my omission of judenrat records may have been a misstep. I should fold those in.

Yes, two in 1941-early 1942. If there are more I'm all ears. I don't see however any new cases having 'transited' an SS-Sonderkommando like BCST.

With the last bit, the claim is a machinery of genocide carried out in a tight and defined physical area. It is a very specific claim levied against the German people.

No, against the National Socialist dictatorship and the SS. NOT the German people.

Antiterrorism, decimations and reprisals are not part of that specific claim and there are historical examples. You chose specifically to point at White examples, but this isn't an exclusively White historical feature. Look at the Haitian Revolution for example.

Or the Cultural Revolution in China, Pol Pot in Cambodia, Rwanda, and many other cases. Europeans can't however claim to have acted more humanely in many cases.

The 'genocide' claim, specifically involving industrialized killing, is the claim I feel is unfounded. Had this truly been the word of the day, they wouldn't have haphazard put something together in various places and it wouldn't have stopped at 6.

They wouldn't have used hydrogen cyanide gas in an occupied building to dispatched the condemned in a semibasment placed yards from the water treatment plant at Auschwitz Birkenau. They would have used the water, much safer, cheaper and just as efficient.

Drowning people en masse would take much longer, dumping highly toxic gas into a room is far quicker.

As soon as you start fantasising about what you think are better ways of killing people, it's probably time to touch grass and take a break.

[SanityCheck]

I don't walk away from Dr SC posts laughing my ass off.

I take it back

If the T4 personnel could kill 100,000 pscyhiatric patients and KZ inmates in Germany and Austria, then the T4 personnel transferred to the GG together with hundreds of Trawnikis could kill 1.5 million Jews.

This is a blatantly ridiculous statement.

It really isn't, since the two operations were only one order of magnitude apart. If T4 had merely bumped off 633 people before part of the personnel were shipped to Poland to kill 1.5 million, that would be several orders of magnitude apart.

The Third Reich presided over the deaths of around 2 million Soviet POWs up to spring 1942, so basically the start of what became Aktion Reinhardt. 10s of 1000s were killed as commissars, thousands by the frontline troops, thousands more in the rear, 35,000 in concentration camps - so-called Aktion 14 f 14, paralleling and overlapping with Aktion 14 f 13.

250,000 of those Soviet POWs died in the Government-General by April 1942. Up to July 1942, 80,000 Jews had died in the Warsaw ghetto; starvation in the POW camps was worse, it killed a larger proportion.

Arad doesn't count more than 200,000 killed in Belzec and Sobibor in the first half of 1942. That, too, set a precedent for the second half of 1942 when a million were deported.

As I keep on stressing, a pure expulsion would have resulted in potentially as many fatalities from starvation and exposure as died in the camps, since there's no evidence of food being available for such a mass of people on the arrival end.