bombsaway wrote: ↑Tue Jan 06, 2026 3:28 am
I need a frame of reference so I would base this on other times "Trials conducted by enemy powers in the hysteria of the immediate postwar" have occurred.
In terms of general pronouncements by the trial or claims by the prosecution I would say B)
B is obviously the correct answer. And if you concede B, I think it is hard to then turn around and claim that we have 99.9999999% confidence in precedents set by admittedly biased and unreliable courts.
In terms of "direct evidence", eg perpetrator testimony and documents, I would say there's no precedent for what you allege so I would go for C.
I have already pointed out the problems with your idea that the "testimony and documents" are not influenced by the larger investigations.
https://codohforum.com/viewtopic.php?t=86
"Testimonies" - these will be influenced by interrogators and by prosecutors and by the selection of which witnesses get the spotlight. The Soviet Katyn report had "over 100 eyewitnesses." All worthless.
"Documents" - even aside from the possibility of falsification (which an occupying power would have means, motive, and opportunity to do) we have the undeniable problem of selection bias. The prosecution cherry-picks only those documents that they find useful while inconvenient documents never see the light of day. This problem has been acknowledged by many mainstream historians like A. J. P. Taylor.
Additionally we have the question of the
quality of these "testimonies and documents." If you actually read through these materials, the stories immediately begin to fall apart.
I should also remind you that perpetrators faced "normal trials" in West Germany and the result was exactly the same, which strengthens this view.
Those trials were hardly "normal." The West German trials were not held until the 1960s by which point the six million and the gas chambers and so forth had already long been established as "fact," notably at Nuremberg. The issue of precedent is why Nuremberg is so important.
The mastermind behind the West German trials was a Jewish prosecutor named Fritz Bauer who was also key in the Eichmann trial.
viewtopic.php?t=278
How did so many Germans become contrite about the Nazi past? In his gripping and well-researched biography, “The Prosecutor,” Jack Fairweather argues that the answer lies in part in the work of an irascible, honorable German Jewish lawyer named Fritz Bauer, who pressed the people of his country “to face their complicity in the industrialized mass murder of Europe’s Jews."
And we see similar motivations on display in the trial proceedings. Prosecutor Henry Ormond at Frankfurt:
If the survivors of the hell of Auschwitz could no longer bear witness – and certain circles are waiting for just that – then Auschwitz would become nothing more than a legend in a short time. Were it not for this trial, in which the truth was heard out of the mouths of the survivors, those who refuse to learn would have continued their attempts to minimize. That this is no longer possible is, next to the punishment of the guilty, the lasting achievement of this exemplary trial. (quoted in Naumann)
These trials were
-highly political
-did not treat "the Holocaust" as an open question (precedent)
-had the express intention of guilt-tripping the German public
I think this is completely speculative, all the more so because
governments formally did not endorse these stories during the war, unlike something like this
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joint_Dec ... ed_Nations. Another clear differentiation is the presence of actual intelligence reports. Apparently the corpse factory was in France, yet no contemporaneous reports emerged, unlike what you see for the Holocaust. Your comparison doesn't work.
The part in bold is untrue.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Committee ... n_Outrages
And
there were actual "corpse factories," but they processed
animal corpses. A lot of atrocity propaganda is of that form. It takes something real and mispresents it in some sinister way. All you would need to do to "prove" the human corpses were processed would be to produce some "eyewitnesses" claiming to have seen this at these animal corpse processing facilities.
Regarding the Dec 1942 declaration, I will refer you to a prior comment of mine.
-The statement did not endorse the two million figure that was being pushed by the WJC at that time.
-The statement did not endorse any of the more fanciful killing methods such as gas chambers and electric floors, nor the human soap factories and other stories Rabbi Wise was spouting.
-In a joint statement on atrocities the next year, a reference to gas chambers was expressly removed from a draft at the request of the British who felt the claim was not well supported.
-The Dec 1942 statement refers to "Hitler's oft-repeated intention to exterminate the Jewish people in Europe" but this claim that the extermination program was public conflicts with the simultaneous claim of tremendous secrecy.
-Behind the scenes, there was considerable skepticism about about these claims and the statement was made only in response to pressure by the WJC in Britain and in the USA. There were private objections to the statement. For instance, R.B. Reams of the State Department remarked: "I have grave doubts in regard to the desirability or advisability of issuing a statement of this nature. In the first place, these reports are unconfirmed and emanate to a great extent from the Riegner letter to Rabbi Wise."
-The State Department stopped forwarding correspondence from the WJC in Switzerland to NY and the State Department's unwillingness to indulge the Zionists sufficiently is what led to the conflict between State and Morgenthau's Treasury. This would eventually lead to the creation of the War Refugee Board.
https://codohforum.com/viewtopic.php?p=13512&#p13512