The best case for the Holocaust.
1 - Introduction.
The best case for any historical event, is derived from evidence. The Holocaust is no different.
The history of the Holocaust has been determined by gathering contemporaneous evidence, from documents, eyewitness statements, physical items, forensic findings, archaeological analysis, imagery and circumstances. That evidence is then pieced together chronologically, to prove a narrative of events and determine what happened to the Jews, 1939-45, during WWII. From the evidence, historians can determine what happened to Jews arrested by the Nazis and their allies and sent to camps and ghettos and those who escaped or otherwise avoided arrest. Corroborating evidence from multiple sources, the majority of which is from the Nazis and their allies, proves that millions of the arrested Jews were murdered and that by 1945, only a few hundred thousand had survived. That history has an origin and a conclusion, and it has never been subject to a major revision, such that evidence has emerged, to radically change that narrative.
After decades of evidence gathering, the main narrative of the Holocaust, has remained unchanged. The Nazis identified, arrested and imprisoned Jews. Their property was confiscated and they were forced into camps and ghettos. Many were used as slave labourers and those not needed for work, or who regarded as partisans, were killed. The killings were by mass shootings and in certain camps, inside chambers. Mass transports cleared the ghettos to specific camps, where the same process of selection, undressing, deaths inside chambers made to look like showers, mass graves and cremations is described across all the camps. Eyewitnesses who worked inside the camps, are consistent regarding the process. No eyewitness has been traced who describes a significantly different process. Details about the process vary, such as what caused the deaths inside the chambers. But there is no variation whereby something other than chambers were used to kill people.
There are examples of narratives that have not stood the test of time. Investigations established they were poorly or not evidenced, such as the manufacturing of Jewish soap and the Dachau gas chamber. There are also many narratives that are uncertain, which is primarily due to Nazi destruction of evidence. For example, the demolition of the crematoriums at Birkenau and the exhumation and cremation of corpses in the graves at the AR camps. That prevented detailed forensic, evidence gathering examination of the buildings and the graves.
To revise a historical event, evidence must be presented, that proves something different took place. Evidence that comes from eyewitnesses, documents etc. History is not revised by attempting to argue an event did not take place.
2 – Attempts to revise the history of the Holocaust.
Holocaust denial is the commonly used term to describe those who deny, or diminish certain key events during WWII, regarding Nazi treatment of the Jews. It encompasses Holocaust revision, which also denies certain parts of the established history and makes some limited attempts to present a different version.
The primary event denied, is that c2.5 million Jews were gassed in chambers. Some also deny that mass shootings, such as at Babi Yar, Ukraine, in 1941, took place. Others, who claim that The World Almanac estimates of the Jewish population, is proof that the population grew slightly during the war, or that only 271k died as per a Red Cross report, are denying pretty much every event attributed to the Holocaust. For them, Jewish losses were no worse, or less than, any other group of civilians.
“Only 271k people (jews AND Christians) died in German work camps during WW2 confirmed by Red Cross, most of Typhus. World almanac 1933-1948 Jew world population rose by 700k Christians population in SAME period down 60 Million it was a Christian Holocaust”
That attempt to revise the history, falls flat, as it only records 13 of the camps, none of the ghettos and it comes from a source, the Red Cross, that admits it was duped.
https://www.icrc.org/en/document/icrc-wwii-holocaust
“The ICRC has publicly expressed its regret regarding its impotence and the mistakes it made in dealing with Nazi persecution and genocide.”
Holocaust revisionism is the descriptive preferred by those who believe that they are historically revising the Holocaust. In 1975, Arthur Butz published ‘The Hoax of the Twentieth Century’. Most of the book is about why he believes the Holocaust did not involve mass killings and gas chambers. He makes only a limited attempt to revise the history.
https://files.secure.website/wscfus/103 ... z-542p.pdf
In the chapter “What happened to them?” Butz lists six alternatives.
“1. The Germans liquidated many while in retreat, because these people could be considered manpower to be employed against the Germans.”
“2. The Russians liquidated many. We list this only because Russia is such an enigma and its actions in the populations area often seem very arbitrary. However, there is no evidence for liquidations at the hands of the Russians and one should doubt this possibility.”
“3. Many perished on account of conditions in the camps or ghettos. This is a most serious possibility.”
“4. Many were dispersed throughout the Soviet Union and integrated into Soviet life somewhere. This is a most likely possibility because it is well established that the Soviet Union encouraged the absorption of Jews during and immediately after the war.”
“5. Many of the uprooted Jews might have returned to their original homes, or at least to their original homelands, in Europe.”
“6. Many of the Jews eventually resettled neither in the Soviet Union nor in their original countries but elsewhere, mainly in the US and Palestine.”
A genuine historical revision would not list possibilities, including ones that are doubted. It would provide the evidence to prove that one or other of the suggestions took place. His conclusion is that Europe’s Jews were not exterminated. Instead, they were resettled, deported to the East, having had their property confiscated and whilst they did suffer, such that maybe a million died, everyone suffered.
Butz’s first suggestion is that many Jews died during the retreat. He states, “it is very likely that a fair number perished in the disorderly and chaotic conditions that accompanied the German retreat”, but he gives no figures and he makes no effort to gather evidence to establish how many died. He does not use the term death marches, which is how historians describe the chaos and retreat in 1945.
Compare that to the historical study of what took place as the Nazis abandoned the camps and fled west. Individual marches have been tracked, with documents, eyewitness and photographic evidence gathered to produce a history. For example, from Auschwitz in 1945.
https://www.auschwitz.org/en/history/ev ... ath-march/
“The next place on the “death march” route was Pszczyna—the locality from which prisoners, including those from the sub-camp in nearby Czechowice-Dziedzice, were evacuated westward in the direction of Poręba and Jastrzębie Zdrój, as well as in the direction of Żory and Świerklany. At the Holy Cross cemetery on ulica Żorska in Pszczyna there is a grave (consolidated from several graves in 1965) that is the resting place of victims of the events of January 1945, including some who were shot while attempting to escape from the evacuation transport.”
It is not clear why Butz includes his number 2 suggestion, as he admits it is not evidenced. He then glosses over what he calls the “most serious possibility” of deaths in camps and ghettos. Most of the Holocaust took place inside camps and ghettos and according to historians, that is where the majority of deaths occurred. Research has been ongoing since the end of the war, identifying and gathering evidence, about each camp and ghetto, to the point it is now estimated,
https://www.nationalww2museum.org/war/a ... amp-system
“The Nazis created at least 44,000 camps, including ghettos and other sites of incarceration, between 1933 and 1945”.
It stands to reason that if 5 to 6 million Jews were not murdered, 1939-45, then by 1945, those 44,000 camps and ghettos would be populated by 5 to 6 million Jews. Or, if Butz is correct and a million died in those camps and ghettos, that would leave 4 to 5 million still alive. Historical research blows that possibility apart. The last ghetto to close, was at Lodz, in August 1944, with its final prisoners being transported to Auschwitz. It housed 160,000 Jews at its height. The largest ghetto was at Warsaw, with a population high of c400,000. It closed in May 1943. Historians are not left with a chronological gap, as they can evidence where Jews from the ghettos went and what happened during their closure. Over a million Jews are documented to have been transported from ghettos as they were closed, to the system of Action Reinhard camps, 1942-3. Just under a million are documented to have gone to Auschwitz-Birkenau 1941-4. The vast majority then disappear from the Nazi records. Historians evidence that was because they were killed. Butz is left with a gap, that he tries to fill with his suggestions, 4, 5 and 6. But they do not work, as they do address the Jews that the Nazis had imprisoned inside the ghettos and camps 1939-44 and why the ghettos had all closed down by 1944.
Historians go into detail, tracking population movements, not just Jewish, during WWII. For example, the system of forced labour.
https://www.museum-zwangsarbeit.de/en/g ... infuehrung
“During World War II, more than 20 million people were coerced into performing forced labor for Germany in occupied Europe and in the German Reich…A total of more than 20 million people from almost all parts of Europe performed forced labor—as civil foreign workers, prisoners of war, or prisoners in the camps of the SS, the Gestapo, or the justice system: over 13 million within Germany and some 7 million in German-occupied areas.”
https://www.basf.com/rs/sr/who-we-are/H ... -auschwitz
“In June 1942, I.G. Farben begins constructing its own concentration camp on its factory grounds in Monowitz (Auschwitz III or Buna/Monowitz). The first 600 inmates are committed at the company’s own concentration camp in October 1942; the camp reaches its maximum occupancy of over 11,000 prisoners in July 1944.”
Butz merely glosses over, or he makes no attempt to provide an evidenced chronological, gap free narrative. Instead, he jumps about, referencing Jews who were integrated into the Soviet Union, who were never arrested by the Nazis, so their existence is moot, to after the war and those who returned home. Butz sub-titles his work.
“THE CASE AGAINST THE PRESUMED EXTERMINATION OF EUROPEAN JEWRY”
But, in fact, historians are not presuming anything, instead they can evidence and track what happened, not just to Jews, but to everyone the Nazis arrested and sent to the camps and ghettos. That is the greatest strength and best case for the Holocaust, it can be evidenced. It is not just Butz who cannot evidence a revised history, it is Faurrison, Mattogno, Graf, Rudolf, Kues and every supposed revisionist who has been to an archive or interviewed potential witnesses and tried to gather evidence. Their supposed revisions are inconclusive non histories. The best case for the Holocaust, is strengthened by the failure of so-called Holocaust revision to find evidence that alters the main narrative.
3 – Circumstantial evidence is normally considered one of the weakest forms of evidence.
By 1945, the Allies, who had treated many of the reports of mass murder by the Nazis during the war with scepticism, were satisfied that they were true. Newspaper reports, such as this from the Harrisberg Telegraph in December 1942,
https://newspapers.ushmm.org/historical ... azis-40547
“2 million Jews slain by Nazis”, were widely regarded as exaggerated, if not out right atrocity stories. But, by 1945, the Western Allies had only liberated a few hundred thousand Jews from the camps, with the largest at Bergen-Belsen, of c60,000 not all of whom were Jewish. The only large surviving Jewish populations were the Danes who escaped to Sweden in 1943 and in France, due to a lack of cooperation by the French authorities who had remained in power. The majority of Jews transported from France to the camps, were foreign Jews who had fled there 1939-40. Historians can evidence that Norwegian Jews who escaped to Sweden, survived and were alive in 1945. They cannot evidence the mass survival of those who were arrested and sent to the camps. Neither can the Holocaust revisionists.
In 1945, the Soviets, Western Allies and every single country occupied or aligned to the Nazis, reported that Jews had been the subject of arrests and many of them were now missing. The Dutch had been very cooperative, in identifying and arresting Jews. In 1943, 34,000 were transported to Sobibor and in 1945, only 18 were reported to have returned home. It is since the fall of Communism and the Baltic States gaining independence, that Latvia and Lithuania have admitted that auxiliary soldiers and even civilians, joined with the Einsatzgruppen shooting Jews. Romania, aligned to but never occupied by the Nazis, admits to the mass killing of Jews. Eastern Europe, which had been the world centre of Jews in 1939, had villages, towns and cities that now had no Jews. Historians, from all over Europe, have faced up to and evidenced that the Nazis received a lot of support and assistance.
The circumstantial evidence of millions of missing Jews in 1945, was overwhelming and aligns with mass murder, not mass resettlement, especially when the supposed resettlement was in the places that reported the largest drops in Jewish population, where Nazi reports and policy was to clear the land of Jews and make it “Juden-frei”.
4 – Where an absence of evidence is evidence of absence.
Historians and revisionists have also failed to find evidence to prove the conspiracy that is needed to fake the Holocaust. That evidence needed to be in place by 1945, for the Allies to gather, to prove that the reports of mass shootings and death camps were correct. Revisionists suggest the Soviets were responsible, but Soviet historians are silent about the Holocaust. That seems odd, as how could the Soviets control the narrative, when they did nothing to set it? Stalin said nothing about the plight of the Jews. There is no Soviet memorial to the Holocaust. There is no evidence the Soviets were trying to hoax the mass murder of millions, let alone evidence they were capable of such an undertaking. The massacre at Katyn in 1941, was the subject of fake claims by the Soviets, but, by the early 1990s, the last of the Soviet leadership before the fall of Communism had admitted to Soviet responsibility for the killings. If one massacre could not be sustained as a hoax, then the multiple mass killings of Jews could not be maintained.
Instead, it was the Polish who reported on the mass killings, with intelligence gathering for the Government in Exile in London. Reports came from escaped Polish and Slovakian prisoners. Even revisionists cannot bring themselves to believe that the Poles and Slovakians could hoax the world, with a fake Holocaust. If the Vrba-Wetzler report of 1944, and claims of gas chambers inside the Kremas, had not subsequently been evidenced by Nazi documents and eyewitnesses, they would have been dismissed as atrocity claims.
No whistleblower has come forward with, or leaked evidence of a hoax. It is highly unlikely that the Dutch would be so contrite about their role as Nazi collaborators, when so many had been Nazi sympathisers. When Willem Sassen conducted a series of interviews with Eichmann in Argentina in 1956-7, it was the perfect opportunity for historical revision. Eichmann, who had been put in charge of organising Hungarian transports to Auschwitz in 1944, speaking to a former SS officer, admitted he knew about and had witnessed mass killings.
https://hac.bard.edu/amor-mundi/excerpt ... 2013-07-12
“The executions at Litzmannstadt and Minsk were a deep shock to me. Certainly I too had been aiming at a solution of the Jewish problem, but not like this. Of course, at that time, I had not yet seen burned Germans, Germans shrunken like mummies in death.”
Whether it was whilst being tortured by angry US or British soldiers or making a statement to German prosecutors in Frankfurt with no evidence of any coercion, or safe in South America with an ex-Nazi, no evidence has been provided to revise the history of mass killings and that such killings had been faked. When the Red Cross were allowed into camps, it was under strict conditions. If they had been shown around the Birkenau Kremas in 1944, and there were no gas chambers, there would be no claims about it being a death camp.
There are many examples of why exposing the Holocaust as fake, are in national interests. When the Baltic States gained their independence in the early 1990s, it would have been to their benefit to expose a hoax and that they had not collaborated to shoot Jews. Putin has citied fear of increasing Ukrainian Nazism as a reason for invading Ukraine.
https://www.ispionline.it/en/publicatio ... war-166668
“Russian state media have depicted Ukraine as a “Nazi-rampant” country since 2014, data showed that the number of articles linking Ukraine to Nazism spiked on the day of the invasion”.
Ukrainians fought with the SS and worked at the AR camps. Post war, the main war crimes trials run by the Soviets, were of Ukrainians. It would have been very much in Ukraine’s interests, when it gained independence in 1991, to blow the Holocaust hoax, and rid itself of fake Soviet/Russian claims about its role.
Israel does have a lot of support in Europe, but there is at least an equal amount of anti-Semitism and anger at Israeli actions against the Palestinians. That alone would be a strong incentive for someone who knew about the hoax and had evidence to blow it, to at least leak it to the press. Or, to present it as new evidence. In 2000 the Hofle telegram was found in the UK National Archive. If it had recorded mass transports back out of the AR camps, rather than just arrivals, that would be evidence to revise the history of those camps. But nothing like that has appeared.
5 – The eyewitness evidence is, contrary to revisionist claims, strong.
When someone accused of a crime and the victim of the crime, or when people who would not normally cooperate, or they have never met, or they speak different languages, agree with each other, that is strong corroborating evidence.
When those witnesses are in complete agreement about the main event alleged, that is strong corroboration. When they vary in the details, that is evidence they have not colluded and worked to get their stories to match.
Revisionists like to create a false impression about the witnesses, by mixing hearsay with eyewitness claims. When a second-hand intelligence report states people died in steam chambers, but the eyewitnesses say it exhaust from an engine, it is wrong to conflate the two. When every SS camp staff member, German civilian contractor and Jewish Sonderkommandos from multiple countries, who worked inside the Birkenau Kremas all agree that they were converted to use for gassing people, that is compelling, corroborating, eyewitness evidence. There are bound to be inconsistencies in the details, such as how many were gassed and how long cremations took, as people are proven to poor at many estimations and memory fades.
Historians do not need to resort to arguing that gassings took place, as an alternative to using evidence. They have the corroborating eyewitnesses, who are in complete agreement and who are corroborated by documents, physical, forensic and circumstantial evidence. That is how all history is normally investigated and established. Revisionists cannot do that. They try to argue that the gassings were not technically possible, even though modifying a room to use as a gas chamber, was well within the capabilities of German design and engineering in the 1940s. The historians have the corroborated admissions of the engineers responsible. Revisionists have no eyewitnesses and resort to unique to themselves interpretations and arguments about ventilation capacities and how much coke would be needed. As if not knowing exactly how something worked, is evidence it cannot have happened.
6 – Evidence of motive, opportunity and guilty conduct after the crime.
The Nazi motive to kill Jews is that well proven, most revisionists do not deny it, though they often frame the killings as justified partisan actions. It is the extent of the killings that is denied. Whilst they argue liquidate and exterminate means resettle, they do not deny that the Nazi plan was to make Europe Jew free. WWII and the extent of their control gave the Nazis the opportunity to progress the plan. That the Nazis had a lot of assistance, meant that they progressed at a frightening rate, particularly in 1942-3. Poland, the country with the highest Jewish population, ceased to exist, with Germans taking over control of all authorities. With Latvians, Lithuanians, Romanians and Serbs also killing Jewish citizens, the Nazis, particularly in Eastern Europe had no political fears about their actions. When ordered to, from Norway to Greece, local authorities transported Jews to the camps in Poland.
Despite their best efforts at secrecy and to destroy evidence, a successful cover up of the mass murder of millions of Jews, by shooting and gassing, was impossible. From 1941 onwards, news of the mass killing of Jews had been leaking out to the Allied powers. The AR camps were treated unlike any other and raised to the ground, left guarded and planted over. The only buildings that were demolished at A-B, were the four Kremas and two farmhouses at Birkenau that housed the gas chambers. Other buildings, including Krema I, that had been converted to an air raid shelter in 1944, were left intact. When someone accused of a crime, destroys evidence, that can be used to infer guilt. Revisionists try to exploit the gaps in the evidence, particularly the lack of an intact gas chamber at a death camp site. All that does is further reveal that they cannot evidence what took place. A gap in the evidence, such as how much wood was used for the cremation pyres at Sobibor and where it came from, is not a problem for the historical narrative. It does not cause it to fail. There are many events in history that we do not know how they happened, that does not mean they did not happen.
7- Examples of well evidenced events.
Some examples of specific events in the Holocaust that are well evidenced. (I have not added any links to the evidence, as that would apparently be a document dump. Revisionists hate being shown lots of evidence)
The use of gas chambers inside the Birkenau Kremas, to gas people. The evidence from that comes from multiple documents, that record the modification of the Kremas in 1943, for a special action that involved Jews, infirm prisoners and Hungarians. Barracks to store property, heated undressing rooms, gas chambers and ovens for continuous multiple corpse cremations, are not normal for crematoriums. Revisionists try to ascribe innocent reasons for each piece of evidence, whilst failing to assess all of that evidence together, in context of the operation of the buildings, resulting in an evidenced logical conclusion. Witnesses describe the gas chambers were made to look like showers and they are corroborated by a document that records shower fittings and the find of a shower head in the ruins of Krema II in 2006. All the witnesses are in agreement about the process inside the buildings. They are supported by the circumstantial evidence around its operation and camp documents that record mass arrivals and then many disappearing.
The operation of the AR camps is well evidenced, despite, ironically, one of the documents being about secrecy, with Hofle’s order not to speak about the operation and no photographs, which was ignored by some. The telegram listing arrivals at the camps, provides one of the most detailed sources for historians to work out approximate death tolls. It is corroborated by ghetto transports records, the Stroop Report and Ganzenmuller Letter, to prove the mass transports. Globocnik’s order for excavators for Belzec and his summary of work for Himmler in October 1943, mean that operations are well documented, despite the clear destruction of records from the camps themselves. The camp staff trials, most of which took place in West Germany in the 1960s, with no evidence of any coercion, corroborate the Jewish prisoner narrative.
Multiple archaeological surveys have all found large areas of disturbed ground, containing buried cremated and some decomposed remains, corroborate the descriptions of mass graves, that were exhumed as the policy changed to cremation.
The Einsatzgruppen mass shootings in Eastern Europe are that well evidenced, most do not deny them. That some were photographed or filmed, makes denial difficult. The only debate, which is one historians have had, is over the death tolls, which are likely exaggerated. The evidence from the OSRs and reports to senior Nazis about the killings, including Himmler’s report to Hitler in 1942, of 363,211 Jews executed over 4 months, proves that it is likely millions were killed. Revisionist attempts to frame the shootings as a justifiable partisan action do not work, as Jews are often listed separately. That documents record areas being made Jew free, proves the policy was to rid the territory of Jews, which makes revisionist claims, such as by Butz, Jews were being resettled in the east, untenable.
8 – Conclusion
The Holocaust is better evidenced than any denier or revisionist will ever admit. It is certainly far better evidenced than any attempted revision, as exampled above. It has been investigated by historians from all over the world. It stands to reason that some of them were/are sympathetic to the Nazis, or they are anti-Semitic. The majority of countries do not have denial laws. But, since 1945, the main narrative of Jews being identified, rounded up and arrested, sent to camps and ghettos, forced to work and those not needed for work killed, has not changed. The process described at the death camps of mass transports from the ghettos, a selection process, gassing in places made to look like showers, mass graves and cremations and the theft or personal possessions, has not changed. Historians, because of the strength of the evidence, have reached a consensus as to what took place.
The so-called revisionists cannot do that. Their claims are so poorly evidenced that they cannot reach any consensus, with various, often competing claims. That is why they resort to arguments, as if whether they believe something is possible or not, is evidence to prove it did, or did not happen. The bombing of Dresden is not disproved, by arguing it was not physically possible for the British to do so much damage, therefore it did not happen. To disprove it would need evidence, such as eyewitness who state there were no raids and photographs of an intact city centre.
For any historian to revise the history of the Holocaust, they would need new eyewitnesses to the workings of the AR camps, who speak to a process that ends with the majority of people leaving the camp. Or documents proving mass transports back out, to other places. Or GPR that finds undisturbed ground. Evidence such as that would be genuine revision and that there is none, means the existing evidence is the best case for the Holocaust.
Best case for the Holocaust.
Re: Best case for the Holocaust.
A summary of the above. I argue that,
- history is evidenced, not argued.
- the existing evidence is the best case for the Holocaust, despite what so-called revisionists think.
- attempts to revise the existing history have been abject failures, which further strengthens the first argument.
- there is a lack of evidence of a conspiracy to hoax and provided examples of where a hoax is against national interests.
- I give examples of how the evidence is strong, circumstantially, from the eyewitnesses, in terms of motive, opportunity and conduct after the crime and give some specific examples of well evidenced events.
- history is evidenced, not argued.
- the existing evidence is the best case for the Holocaust, despite what so-called revisionists think.
- attempts to revise the existing history have been abject failures, which further strengthens the first argument.
- there is a lack of evidence of a conspiracy to hoax and provided examples of where a hoax is against national interests.
- I give examples of how the evidence is strong, circumstantially, from the eyewitnesses, in terms of motive, opportunity and conduct after the crime and give some specific examples of well evidenced events.
