Did Polish investigations save the day?

[Nessie]

https://www.adl.org/resources/backgroun ... ial-claims

"The initial four million figure inscribed on the Auschwitz plaques was reported by the Soviet Union and was generally accepted in Soviet-controlled countries, including Poland, until the 1990s.[21] Western scholars, however, had long rejected the figure as anti-Western propaganda not supported by the evidence, and placed the total number of Auschwitz casualties between one and two million.[22] It was these same Western scholars who had originally estimated the total number of Jews killed in the Holocaust at approximately six million.[23]
When the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum formally rejected the four million figure in the early 1990s (following Poland’s emergence from communism in 1989), it was abandoning a number that many scholars had already rejected decades before."

So far, evidence of one BBC documentary using the 4 million figure, has been presented as evidence that it was commonly used in the West.

Moron.

Western media:
https://www.nytimes.com/1967/04/17/arch ... ument.html

Western trial:
http://www.bergenbelsen.co.uk/pages/Tri ... s_128.html

Western encyclopedia:
https://archive.org/details/encyclopaed ... =auschwitz



This is from the 1972 Encyclopedia Britannica found on Archive.org. I also have a hardcopy physical set from a later decade, and it indeed gives a range, from 1.1 - 4 million.

Cope more.

You need to do much more, to prove the 4 million Soviet figure was in widespread use in the West, when Western historians were not using it. But, you have made a reasonable start and bombsaway and I may be wrong on this one.

[HansHill]

You need to do much more, to prove the 4 million Soviet figure was in widespread use in the West, when Western historians were not using it. But, you have made a reasonable start and bombsaway and I may be wrong on this one.

I don't need to do anything, bucko - the original claim, as stated, is untenable. To repeat the original claim:

The 4 million at Auschwitz was never taken seriously in the west

- Bombsaway

I've demonstrated via broadcast and print media, encyclopedic & reference material, as well as Western trials, that this is not the case. Your best bet to salvage some damage control on this, is for Bombsaway to rejoin us after Hanukkah and clarify what he means by "taken seriously" and perhaps, limit that assertion to strictly peer-reviewed academic journals, or something. But good luck to him.



As it stands and as I've shown, entire generations of people in the West were targeted with this dogshit propaganda.

[Stubble]

But, but, Herr Hill, you can't prove they were serious!

Also, didn't Debbie lipshitz say 4,000,000 at Auschwitz, after the plaque had already been changed, post Zundel Trial?

I'll check.

[Nessie]

If bombsaway says he was referring to Western historians, then you are wrong. If he meant the media, then it looks like he was wrong.

[HansHill]

Lol.

So anyway, the Holocaust narrative both East and West, as presented, is a house of cards and always has been. We can all move on now.

[Wetzelrad]

Western scholars, however, had long rejected the figure as anti-Western propaganda not supported by the evidence, and placed the total number of Auschwitz casualties between one and two million.

Funny, I have this exact passage in my notes as an example of the ADL's duplicity and of false Holocaust historiography. You make our jobs much easier by pitching it here on your own volition.

In case anyone doubts how wrong the ADL is, there are more Western sources and links to sources here:
https://codohforum.com/viewtopic.php?p=19884#19884

[szlafrok]

The film "Cmentarzysko Europy", (literally: Burial Ground of Europe) mentioned in the first post on the thread, blames the Germans for Katyn, which is subsequently used as the basis for denying the claims of the Polish government in exile and installing the nascent communist regime. The film attempts to establish a psychological justification for the new PRL. As it announces at the beginning: "the rebirth of democratic Polish statehood is shining brightly once again." The main tactic is a "tu quoque" argument on steroids.
The production company was a soviet military operation - the Wytwórnia Filmów Wojska Polskiego "with the participation of the Central Studio of Documentary Films in Moscow". The film includes clips taken shortly after liberation of the camp (July '44) and the castle (prison) in Lublin itself, as well as clips from the (show) trial of camp guards which would have been in Nov-Dec 1944. This timeline overlaps the Powstanie Warszawskie from Aug to early Oct '44, and that is not unimportant - the Soviet offensive stalling on the east side of the Vistula, allowing the dismantling of the Armia Krajowa (AK) in Warsaw, is precisely the moment when Soviet power is established in Poland. The shots of the Lublin prison "liberation" shown in the film are particularly ironic to watch, since the new regime quickly filled it up again with AK members.
Similar to the American Billy (Shmuel) Wilder of "Death Mills" fame, the director of Cmentarzysko was Aleksander Ford (born Moshe Lifszyc in Kiev), a well established film director from before the war, who went on to run the National Film School after the war - until he was eventually purged in 1968. The film is narrated by Władysław Krasnowiecki, a well-known actor with movie credits before and after the war (buried in the military cemetery (Powiązki) in Warsaw. The film makes the claim that the Germans murdered 2 million people at Majdanek, establishes the effectiveness of using piles of shoes as a stand-in for dead bodies (that number well below 2,000,000), but emphasizes the "European" character of the victims, contra the victim group emphasized today. It is worth studying for what it is: a well-executed piece of communist polish-soviet propaganda.

[Eye of Zyclone]

Sometimes the point is distorted to suggest merely that communists are untrustworthy. And this often leads to the false assumption that non-communists are trustworthy. The reality is that the Americans were not very trustworthy either. It's just that the Soviets were especially untrustworthy and they happened to be the ones who had access to the most important sites. As a general rule, we shouldn't take "investigations" done by Germany's enemies at face value. We should expect some bias there. "Omg ALL of Germany's enemies agreed" is not the strong point Nessie thinks it is.

The false belief in America's alleged trustworthiness comes from the fact that the U.S. regime is still alive, very powerful and much talkative. When the National Socialist Government was still in charge in Germany, the best-informed people (i.e. not the populace) in America and neutral countries knew that Goebbels' reports on WW2 were more trustworthy and truthful than the British ones.

[TlsMS93]

She actually uses this flawed argument, that the Soviets gave the Poles ample freedom or that they were independent communists.

Piper endorsed the 4 million death toll until the end of the 1980s when everyone began to see that the USSR was convulsing and about to collapse; in other words, those Poles in charge of the camp fought to the end to maintain the Soviet estimate even with clear evidence that it was excessively high.

[Archie]

The false belief in America's alleged trustworthiness comes from the fact that the U.S. regime is still alive, very powerful and much talkative. When the National Socialist Government was still in charge in Germany, the best-informed people (i.e. not the populace) in America and neutral countries knew that Goebbels' reports on WW2 were more trustworthy and truthful than the British ones.

Some older revisionist talking points (from the Cold War era) would play into this idea somewhat. There's the classic argument about how all the "extermination camps" were located in Poland which was behind the Iron Curtain, which is a good point, but people who go too far with it. I think the Lachout document caused a lot of confusion about this because it suggested the Americans had investigated the Western camps and debunked all the gas chambers there (with the implication that they all would have been debunked if only Western investigators had been allowed to investigate the Eastern camps). But this never actually happened. For that matter, the gas chambers in the Western camps were never really walked back. This is another misconception. There was a walk-back of sorts on the Dachau gas chamber (this is still contested), and they have said there were no "extermination camps" in Germany, but the camp museums actually still maintain small scale gassings at several of the Western camps.

https://codohforum.com/viewtopic.php?t=207

[Nessie]

Western scholars, however, had long rejected the figure as anti-Western propaganda not supported by the evidence, and placed the total number of Auschwitz casualties between one and two million.

Funny, I have this exact passage in my notes as an example of the ADL's duplicity and of false Holocaust historiography. You make our jobs much easier by pitching it here on your own volition.

In case anyone doubts how wrong the ADL is, there are more Western sources and links to sources here:
https://codohforum.com/viewtopic.php?p=19884#19884

There appears to be some disagreement, did 4 million die at Auschwitz, or 4 million Jews? Going by how the Soviets dealt with the Holocaust, it was 4 million in total, not just Jews.

[TlsMS93]

There appears to be some disagreement, did 4 million die at Auschwitz, or 4 million Jews? Going by how the Soviets dealt with the Holocaust, it was 4 million in total, not just Jews.

It is irrelevant to the larger issue of disinformation that they and their henchmen in occupied countries were spreading; the Soviets did not separate groups by nationality or ethnicity, and this was one of the excuses for not signing the Geneva Convention.

[HansHill]

did 4 million die at Auschwitz, or 4 million Jews?

No.

[Eye of Zyclone]

The false belief in America's alleged trustworthiness comes from the fact that the U.S. regime is still alive, very powerful and much talkative. When the National Socialist Government was still in charge in Germany, the best-informed people (i.e. not the populace) in America and neutral countries knew that Goebbels' reports on WW2 were more trustworthy and truthful than the British ones.

Some older revisionist talking points (from the Cold War era) would play into this idea somewhat. There's the classic argument about how all the "extermination camps" were located in Poland which was behind the Iron Curtain, which is a good point, but people who go too far with it. I think the Lachout document caused a lot of confusion about this because it suggested the Americans had investigated the Western camps and debunked all the gas chambers there (with the implication that they all would have been debunked if only Western investigators had been allowed to investigate the Eastern camps). But this never actually happened. For that matter, the gas chambers in the Western camps were never really walked back. This is another misconception. There was a walk-back of sorts on the Dachau gas chamber (this is still contested), and they have said there were no "extermination camps" in Germany, but the camp museums actually still maintain small scale gassings at several of the Western camps.

https://codohforum.com/viewtopic.php?t=207

As the American chief prosecutor Robert Jackson explained at the Nuremberg show trial, the alleged criminal policies of the Third Reich were always treated by all the victors of WW2 like a priori truths, that is, like "facts of common knowledge" (sic) not requiring evidence and even less solid evidence but only judicial notice. All those Soviet-style "war crime" trials only aimed at planting the false belief in the general public's mind that it had been conclusively proven by impartial courts that the propaganda stories of the victors of 1945 were more than baseless allegations and thus that the war had been won by the "good guys" (in contrast to what had happened after WW1).

[Nessie]

did 4 million die at Auschwitz, or 4 million Jews?

No.

Translation of USSR-8 Soviet War Crimes Report on Auschwitz Nuremberg Trial - 6 May 1945.

https://www.jrbooksonline.com/cwporter/ussr8.htm

"...the Germans exterminated over four million citizens of the Soviet Union, Poland, France, Belgium, Holland, Czechoslovakia, Rumania, Hungary, and other countries by shooting and monstrous tortures in Auschwitz camp"

There is only one mention of Jews, "Among those who were subjected to the sterilization operation was a Jewish woman named Bella, from Greece"

So, the Soviets did not say how many Jews died at the camp and they certainly did not suggest the 4 million were mainly Jewish.