Where are the Goalposts?

[bombsaway]

I think it’s more interesting to focus on methodology, evidence, and reasoning rather than social defaults or who says what.

Respectfully disagree. The Holocaust is far far far bigger than the niche vocation of History, whether the standard-bearers and gatekeepers like Dr Terry like it or not. To substantiate this, I only need to point to the fact that there are morons in my country, wielding the levers of State power, who I know are far less knowledgeable than even someone as sloppy as Nessie, on these issues. These insane lunatics would have me locked up for my posts, and my children put into state care and handed over to some Homosexual adopting couple, if they could. All while knowing next to nothing about the thing they are professing, or upholding.

"B-b-but they have advisory boards!". Yes advisory boards including the likes of:

Judeo Liberal NGOs
Israeli think tanks
Transgender rights advocacy groups
etc

So you'll forgive me when I scoff at the ivory tower pompous chorus echo of "heh, just re-write the entire history, denier!" as completely tone-deaf and imperceptible to how the real world actually works. Holocaust Inc and those enforcing it, is a cargo cult.

Would your moral calculus change if you were convinced the Holocaust cult was actually right?

[Booze]

Which genocide would you say is better evidenced?

Dresden.

Good answer

[Booze]

1. very important
2. the credibility is compromised, particularly in the case of the USSR
3. the forensic

Wouldn't it be logical to assume a similar lack of credibility for the occupation government of post-war Poland?
So what forensics are you relying on?

[Nazgul]

I respectfully disagree with the framing here, but not from a place of dismissal.

The subject in question clearly extends beyond academic history into law, politics, and public policy. That reality alone makes it reasonable for people outside professional historiography to engage with it critically, even imperfectly. Disagreement or lack of formal credentials does not automatically imply bad faith or ignorance.

At the same time, concerns about state power, enforcement mechanisms, and how historical narratives are operationalised in the present are separate questions from the historical record itself. Conflating those issues tends to obscure rather than clarify the discussion.

Advisory bodies and institutional consensus can inform policy, but they are not substitutes for transparent reasoning or open debate. Skepticism toward institutional processes does not require rewriting history, just as defending historical scholarship does not require uncritical acceptance of every contemporary application tied to it.

If we want productive dialogue, it helps to distinguish clearly between:

historical evidence,

modern political enforcement,

and the ethical limits of state intervention.

Blurring those lines is usually where conversations stop being constructive.

[Archie]

Also, pointing out that someone “lacks theory of mind” or can’t summarize other viewpoints doesn’t really prove anything about the validity of their argument. It just shuts down discussion instead of engaging with the points being made. You can’t really judge a claim by how someone processes other people’s beliefs.

No one is "shutting down discussion." I'm talking about the art of persuasion. Understanding your audience is Writing 101. I did NOT say that someone who lacks theory of mind cannot be correct. I said someone who lacks theory of mind will generally be unable to understand people who disagree (true by definition) and the persuasive quality of their writing will generally suffer for it.

An argument might seem obvious and valid to you, but it may be totally unconvincing to someone with different priors. To know what material will be most convincing to the intended audience, it helps to be able to put yourself in their shoes and understand why they think they way they do.

A major advantage I have over BA and Nessie is that I understand revisionism and they evidently do not. BA also seems to have some theory of mind difficulties, for example, him thinking confessions at war-crimes trials are rock solid evidence (his view, okay) but then not being able to fathom why others might find these unconvincing. I will give Matt Cockerill some credit here because he at least he understood the objections to statements taken at war-crimes trials. He would highlight instead supposed "non-coercive" statements.

[Archie]

I think for most people all you need is hey, hundreds of Nazis, from top leadership down to the people working at the camps, affirmed the gassings, without any recantations or contradictory testimonies surfacing. I think this is compelling enough because there isn't a similar historical case of so many alleged perpetrators (by an order of magnitude?) admitting to crimes they didn't do.

I haven't read Nessie's essay yet to see if there is anything I can add.

Only a small subset of people will be curious enough to do any research. "Most people" know nothing about the topic, so their opinions are irrelevant. They will go whichever way the wind is blowing.

I would be surprised if Nessie's essay were the best your side could do. If I were you, I would absolutely not want Nessie to be the standard bearer for my side.

Most people are convinced by confessions. When you have hundreds, you automatically have a huge hill to climb for most people.

I don't really care about standard bearers since my reason for being here is not to "stop" Holocaust revisionism. In terms of getting my ideas out to people, yeah I care about that, and insofar as Nessie's essay is at the top and most people will read it without going to mine, I'm less inclined to contribute.

Regarding your last objection, that's why I have a Table of Contents in the OP so all the essays can be accessed directly from the top of the page. Assuming I finish mine before you, mine would be the second and yours the third.

Maybe some people will pick the first one in the list by default and stop, but I wouldn't assume that. Many people will read each one as they are posted. Others may skim through them. Others may choose which to read based on author reputation.

If you want to bitch out, that's your call. I'm already committed to doing one either way. I would just find it amusing if Nessie's (or mine!) were the best anti-revisionism has to offer.

[SanityCheck]

The notion that history should be exempt from the falsification principle is, of course, absurd. Historical hypotheses generally can be falsified, e.g.: "All casualties from the Battle of Waterloo were buried in the cemetery at Y." If later a grave is discovered that predates the battle, the hypothesis is falsified. What matters is whether the hypothesis makes risk‑bearing predictions, i.e. is fully exposed to potential refutation. If not, it is invalidated, at least in practice.

This is a bad example, since you advanced a purported "historical hypothesis" while apparently ignorant of what happened to the dead from Napoleonic battlefields and in particular, the Battle of Waterloo. There don't seem to be good figures on the number of French dead, who were piled up and burned along with horse carcasses, while the British and Prussian dead were counted somewhat better, which should make logical sense as they retained possession of the battlefield whereas the French army retreated in disarray, so any French commanders could hardly count their dead.

The battlefield and associated graves were then plundered to scavenge the bones for use in industrial production (sugar factories being one example from this era).

With the battle of Waterloo, authors and historians had relied on textual sources (military reports etc) for really, several centuries, for their estimates of the casualties of the battle. Archaeologists eventually took an interest with the rise of combat and battlefield archaeology, and were flummoxed to find so few bones from either human or animal (equine) remains in the vicinity of the battlefield site.

This then led the researchers writing the article for the Journal of Belgian History to review historical, textual sources to figure out the context for scavenging of Napoleonic-era battlefields for bones to be exploited in 19th Century industrial factories. Other historical, textual sources cited on the web page about cleaning up Napoleonic battlefields note the burning of human corpses and animal carcasses at the very least as a sanitary measure, but with any surviving bones liable to be filched.

This means that archaeologists cannot 'falsify' the casualties or graves of the battle of Waterloo and have no veto power over textual sources. On the contrary, they had to turn to textual sources to solve the conundrum here.

Bernard Wilkin, Robin Schäfer & Tony Pollard, 'The Real Fate of the Waterloo Fallen: The exploitation of bones in 19th century Belgium', Journal of Belgian History (2023)
https://www.journalbelgianhistory.be/en ... n%20v2.pdf

see also
https://shannonselin.com/2016/07/napole ... d-cleanup/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of ... #Aftermath

The number of dead, and their disposal after the battle, are merely aspects of the battle of Waterloo. The latter cannot be 'falsified' in the same way that a small detail, smaller event or example in a series of events could in principle be. The lack of precise certainty or re-verifiability (because the bodies and their bones disappeared two centuries ago) doesn't make the estimates of death tolls from Waterloo 'falsifiable', either. There are countless battles and massacres in human history which have wider estimate intervals than Waterloo.

Unfortunately, you seem to be mis-applying the concept/principle of falsification. E.g. you can definitely test (and potentially falsify) the claim that the Vel d'Hiv round-up prompted three memorials in Paris, etc. We can ask/investigate who built the memorials, and if we ever stumble across evidence that something else (e.g. political motivations) prompted the memorials, then the claim that the round-up is what prompted these could be falsified. However, if the French government became a prison state and criminalized such investigations/inquiries, this might not be possible (hence, at least partly invalidating claims that the Vel d'Hiv round-up prompted the memorials). The difference between accepted truth (the roundup occurred and the memorials were built) and validity (ensuring proper inference to what actually prompted the memorials) is critical, here, but both are required for an argument/position to be sound.

The bolded part stretches falsificationism to causes, rather than whether something happened. Popper was considering scientific theories and extended his argument to social science theories like Marxism to claim some could not predict things and thus were 'unfalsifiable'.

There hasn't been a lot of clarification as to how the doctrine of falsifiability applies to every past event and must be some kind of inherent feature of how we discuss past events. The usual emphasis is the opposite, on verifiability, seeking corroboration where possible, and accepting that a lot about the past may not leave many traces or indeed any at all, since the passage of time is an information-destroying process. Before censuses one might find names of individuals in various other records surviving to varying degrees, but hit the middle ages and the concept of fixed surnames hadn't stuck yet, as one example.

The existence of Vel d'Hiv memorials and the release of two feature films about the Vel d'Hiv roundup in 2010 can certainly be interpreted within patterns of other evidence for how France in the 21st Century takes an interest in the Holocaust and why it does so (what motivates it). That however won't necessarily rise to the level of a social scientific theory which can be tested and 'falsified'.

The release of La Rafle and Sarah's Key in 2010 constitute cultural-historical events in their own right, more specific to France, but still in the same world that saw the release of Iron Man 2, Taylor Swift's Speak Now album, and the release of Opus Eponymous by the Swedish band Ghost.

For sure, there are some films, albums, novels etc whose release dates might be unclear, and some that were hoaxed or invented or which have been rumoured to exist, but don't. Some cultural products can also be memory-holed or withdrawn, but the memory-holing tends to leave a trace if the product was prominent enough, and the urge to archive and document in the current era means even lost works are 'known' (as is also the case for many texts from the ancient world - we know they existed, someone referred to them, that's it).

This is clear with memorials, since a lot of statues have been pulled down in recent decades, the fact that there were statues and memorials to communist thinkers and leaders in East Bloc states, or Confederate generals in the Deep South, is attested to through textual and visual sources - the erection or pulling down of the statue gets reported, the statue or memorial was photographed.

It is not meaningfully possible to 'falsify' many things that are discrete and human, which can be observed directly with one's own eyes. This includes the existence of the film Iron Man 2 as it's readily available on streaming platforms or for sale as a DVD/BluRay, as is also the case for La Rafle and Sarah's Key. Amazon screwing up one's order wouldn't 'falsify' the existence of the movie.

The existence of Nelson's Column in Trafalgar Square in London has been observed for 183 years, and the statue and square have been the backdrop to events and protests, like the 1990 poll tax riot, and thus features in the background as a recognisable landmark:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poll_tax_ ... d_Firm.jpg

Nelson's Column is a distinctive statue, its existence isn't on a par with the 'all swans are white' classic example of falsifiability. Only if one was seeking to generalise and claim e.g. 'all capital cities have statues dedicated to military or naval flag rank officers' would this apply (and can be easily falsified, black swan style, since not every country or state has marshals, generals or admirals to glorify).

The statue is one of many commemorations or cultural expressions tying in to the battle of Trafalgar in 1805, much as Waterloo Station was named after the battle of Waterloo. The significance of these battles can be argued about, the details as well, but one cannot 'falsify' major events such as these. That would require explaining the existence of every single historical source from all sides.

The same is true of the Vel d'Hiv round-up in Paris in July 1942. This was widely reported at the time, in Switzerland, the US and elsewhere, leaving numerous reactions and reports (from diplomats, relief agencies, churches) and also directives and reports in the Vichy French records, plus the German occupation records and SS papers. There were diarists in Paris noting down what they observed, and eyewitnesses who evaded the round-up or who were caught and survived Drancy and subsequent deportation. Accounts appeared in the Swiss press within weeks. The transport lists and other documentation relating to the transports sent from Drancy to Auschwitz after the round-up 'stocked it up' fit with the overall progression of reporting. This includes the end of year figure for France in the Korherr report.

It may be theoretically true that every individual source ever brought forth on the Vel d'Hiv roundup and its aftermath in Drancy could be stress-tested and 'falsifiable', and this does work to eliminate later fiction (like the novel from 2006 on which the film Sarah's Key was based) from the pile. Other sources might contain understandable errors based on vantage point (e.g. non-Vichy, non-German observers not having access to the precise number arrested, or not being aware that the transports went to Auschwitz in 1942) or when the source was written down (memory errors and the usual vagaries of eyewitness testimony). But those don't add up to the possibility of arguing the entire event was a hoax or hallucinated by all observers.

Maybe you can clarify how one can 'falsify' all the sources to big events like this, the battle of Waterloo, etc. To whether the event as a whole happened - not whether the course of it or extent of it needs revising, because the latter is perfectly normal. I mean things like claiming Stalingrad was never bombed in the last ten days of August 1942, or that no Jews were deported from the Netherlands in 1942-44.

French 'revisionists' don't seem to have disputed the basic facts about deportations from France; the same is true for 'revisionists' in general about deportations, with the signal exception of Butz trying to reduce the scale of the Hungarian Action and making himself look very stupid as a result.



I'm not disputing that smaller events, details, or examples of a series cannot be 'falsified' in the sense of shown to have not happened. Impersonators, sensationalisers, con artists, hoaxers, propagandists and others are quite firmly part of the historical record.

False reports exist, they have to be shown to be false, however. There were false reports in 1944 that the former French prime minister Leon Blum had died in Majdanek. Those were exposed as false in 1945 when he was found alive after being interned in Buchenwald from 1943 then transferred to Dachau in 1945.

Leon Blum's brother Rene was deported from Drancy to Auschwitz in September 1942 and did not survive. He was 64 in 1942, so he was unlikely to be selected for work and his age and health as reported from Drancy made him a prime candidate for perishing. His older brother Leo was in his early 70s by 1943-45 but was treated as a privileged inmate, not dumped into Birkenau. There are conflicting stories from Auschwitz about how Rene died, some of which are hearsay, some might be, and there's the general risk of legend-building because of his 'fame by association'. Vrba noted in his report that Rene Blum "was atrociously tortured, then gassed and burned", but associates his arrival with numbers about 20,000 lower than the transport Rene Blum was actually on. Whether he was tortured then gassed or tortured to death instead of being gassed is unclear; other French survivors who heard things about him similarly note he was tortured, and singled out because of his famous relative (supposedly the SS asked for him on arrival). That could be 'fame by association' and embellishing the story of a well known personality - Rene Blum had some success directing ballet companies in the 1930s.

Nonetheless, Rene Blum did not emerge alive at the end of the war and was not among the 26 survivors of convoi 36 departing from Drancy on 23 September 1942. He was definitely seen in Drancy by direct witnesses, after being seen previously in Compiegne by direct witnesses; his name is on the transport list for the convoy noted; he doesn't seem to have shown up in the death books as a registered inmate or in other Auschwitz camp records.

The conclusion that Rene Blum died at Auschwitz shortly after his arrival is certainly falsifiable, if someone located evidence that he died elsewhere or was seen alive elsewhere, during the war. The conclusion that he did not survive the war would only be falsifiable if evidence came to light showing he lived after liberation, even if only briefly. His poor health as reported from Compiegne and Drancy by direct witnesses and advanced age at 64 make it very unlikely he survived the war.

If his health had grown even worse, he could easily have numbered among the 127 prisoners who died in Drancy before deportation, whose deaths were thoroughly documented in the French system. As a researcher has now shown, the bodies of inmates who died in Drancy were processed cursorily by the French authorities, with autopsies being deemed unnecessary on German orders, with UGIF-Nord arranging their regular burial for those with relatives (bear in mind far from all French citizens of Jewish origin were arrested, and some only very late on) and those whose bodies were unclaimed buried by the French state as indigents.
https://shs.cairn.info/article/E_VIN_143_0099?lang=en

The French state has through to the 21st Century declared non-returning deportees to be dead, with lists published in official gazettes (I forget the details but noticed the publications a few years back on worldcat.org). This is not necessarily any different to German courts after 1945 deciding that a missing soldier should be 'für tot erklärt'. Some of the soldiers might have been identified in later decades if their graves were found and dog tags survived. Many more still haven't been, and the same goes for civilians caught up in WWII.

Such declarations can be falsified if the missing person presumed dead resurfaces; this has been the subject of various dramas set after WWII since mix-ups with records also happened. But not on a mass scale. Some cases coming to light would no more falsify the overall picture with KZ and Auschwitz deportees than it would mean German soldiers hadn't been pulverised by Katyushas or otherwise killed because a few Vermisste resurfaced later in the 1950s (some of whom might have assumed false identities to evade prosecution as war criminals, some died under their new/false names).

The in-principle falsifiability of missing persons cases doesn't mean that missing status is automatically falsified just on someone's say-so or because they really, really want it to be true. There isn't an obligation to instruct 'revisionists' on genealogy research and how one might trace people through the WWII records, postwar tracing services (Arolsen archives etc), immigration records and so on. There probably isn't much point trying this route, but it is how one in-principle could falsify someone's missing person status. One could even try a comparison with other known groups of missing persons, like German soldiers who perished in 1944-45.

This might be as remote as the theoretical possibility that all the sources for the battle of Waterloo could be 'falsified'.

[bombsaway]

If you want to bitch out, that's your call. I'm already committed to doing one either way. I would just find it amusing if Nessie's (or mine!) were the best anti-revisionism has to offer.

I'm not sure what your interest is here, have I ever made a single argument you have found remotely convincing, or has anybody within orthodoxy done this? If on an individual level the arguments don't hold water for you, they won't in collective form either.

I simply don't see the point of investing hours of my time in this. I may still do it, but why bother? It's enough to point out threads like this https://codohforum.com/viewtopic.php?p=21295#p21295 to show revisionists are so far behind they can't even engage.

[HansHill]

Would your moral calculus change if you were convinced the Holocaust cult was actually right?

I have spent the majority of my life passively believing in the Holocaust and my "moral calculus" has remain unchanged since then.

[HansHill]

I'm not sure what your interest is here, have I ever made a single argument you have found remotely convincing, or has anybody within orthodoxy done this? If on an individual level the arguments don't hold water for you, they won't in collective form either.

I simply don't see the point of investing hours of my time in this. I may still do it, but why bother? It's enough to point out threads like this https://codohforum.com/viewtopic.php?p=21295#p21295 to show revisionists are so far behind they can't even engage.

Didn't you make a "BA's Case For Orthodoxy Megathread" on the old site that was nuked when the site went down? This would be a good chance to have a more robust, centralised, and more visible "BA's Case For Orthodoxy 2.0" in essay format. I understand that people's priorities change especially since that thread must have been 4-5 years ago now but, you strike me as the exact perfect candidate for a task like this.

[bombsaway]

I'm not sure what your interest is here, have I ever made a single argument you have found remotely convincing, or has anybody within orthodoxy done this? If on an individual level the arguments don't hold water for you, they won't in collective form either.

I simply don't see the point of investing hours of my time in this. I may still do it, but why bother? It's enough to point out threads like this https://codohforum.com/viewtopic.php?p=21295#p21295 to show revisionists are so far behind they can't even engage.

Didn't you make a "BA's Case For Orthodoxy Megathread" on the old site that was nuked when the site went down? This would be a good chance to have a more robust, centralised, and more visible "BA's Case For Orthodoxy 2.0" in essay format. I understand that people's priorities change especially since that thread must have been 4-5 years ago now but, you strike me as the exact perfect candidate for a task like this.

The point was always dialogue. Convincing you guys you are wasting your time with this movement (a compassionate act) is a lower priority, and defending history as an abstract is lower still

[bombsaway]

Would your moral calculus change if you were convinced the Holocaust cult was actually right?

I have spent the majority of my life passively believing in the Holocaust and my "moral calculus" has remain unchanged since then.

I meant your moral judgements about the "establishment"

[Archie]

If you want to bitch out, that's your call. I'm already committed to doing one either way. I would just find it amusing if Nessie's (or mine!) were the best anti-revisionism has to offer.

I'm not sure what your interest is here, have I ever made a single argument you have found remotely convincing, or has anybody within orthodoxy done this? If on an individual level the arguments don't hold water for you, they won't in collective form either.

I simply don't see the point of investing hours of my time in this. I may still do it, but why bother? It's enough to point out threads like this https://codohforum.com/viewtopic.php?p=21295#p21295 to show revisionists are so far behind they can't even engage.

I've been talking about this for a while.

https://www.skepticforum.com/viewtopic.php?t=33734

Trust me, it's got nothing to do with you. It's just that you spend a lot of time on this already and you said in that other thread that you were going to write one. So ... I assumed you were. Crazy. But then because Nessie submitted one, you said you didn't need to. Even though you didn't even read his.

See also my comments in this thread.
https://codohforum.com/viewtopic.php?t=220

And then very recently I said

If either of them do this (or anyone else), I will do a long pro-Holocaust essay. At some point I will probably do this anyway just because sometimes I feel like we are shadowboxing due to the lack of quality anti-revisionist materials (i.e., concise, well-argued, not gish-gallopy, not ad hominem).

This is the way to move the debate forward. Which I don't think you want. Imo it's the "dialogue" as you call it that's mostly a waste of time. Ultimately it is more efficient to do the work once and have the best material polished and written up for future reference rather than repeating the same stuff endlessly in half-baked form on the forum.

The evidence for the Holocaust is proven beyond a reasonable doubt.

That said, I think we are missing a popular book that concisely describes the positive evidence for the Holocaust for a lay reader. This would be for anti-denial purposes, not historiographical purposes, since historians already know the Holocaust happened.

I'm considering writing such a book fwiw. (The reason such a book does not already exist, by the way, is not a conspiracy, but because it would be of little use to historians.)

HC is a superlative resource and one without which I would never have gotten off the ground in my own anti-denial activities.

But HC generally focuses on its excellent rebuttals of deniers, rather than comprehensively laying out the positive evidence for the Holocaust. You can find the latter on HC (as in scholarship) but you have to put the different pieces together for yourself, which is a method that is not so lay-reader friendly.

HC is also in an interesting space where it is somewhere in between popular and academic discourse. Again, I think the kind of treatment called for here would be firmly within the scope of popular discourse, although the author should be historically savvy.

I've been saying this on here for a while and you are the first one who has understood. Good job! Most of them get very defensive about this (especially SM).

For what it's worth, I felt like your overview essay that you did for the Dalton debate was a step in the right direction. Although naturally I disagree with your analysis, you had a clear thesis and presented positive evidence for your position in a direct and concise way. It was not simply a drawn out attack on Mattogno and other revisionists. Several months ago I myself posted a possible outline for how this might be done (purely as an intellectual exercise) and I came up with something fairly similar to your outline.

https://rodoh.info/thread/568/request-s ... e-strawman

Spoiler

How is that a summary of the revisionist case? At best you have simply stated a revisionist conclusion (no gassings, which is not even the main one imo) without any explanation of how that conclusion was reached. When I say revisionist "case," I mean the evidence and arguments supporting the position, not just a bare conclusion. I doubt you could find a single revisionist who would endorse your post as a good summary of "the revisionist case."

Despite your miserable failure, I will give my own summary of the orthodox case. There are of course counterpoints and naturally I do not agree with many of these interpretations but out of fairness I will refrain from offering any of my own commentary here. I think by comparing my answer with Nessie's, it will be abundantly obvious who is strawmanning who. I will also point out here that the orthodox side is usually resistant to presenting their side and insist that the Holocaust does not need to be proved.

Demographics
-Prewar statistics of global Jewish population were generally around 16.7M. Some estimates a bit lower in the 15-16M range. The postwar figures are usually around 11M. Revisionist figures from Sanning and others often rely on selective/cherrypicked numbers and assumptions.
-Much evidence of Jews being registered, concentrated, and deported from Western Europe, from Poland, from Hungary and other places. Korherr, internal Hungarian deportation figures.
-By all accounts the Jewish population of Poland dropped dramatically.
-Lack of evidence of resettlement on the scale that would be required.
-Hoefle telegram indicates over 1M Jews were sent to the AR camps.

Final Solution
-Abundant evidence of anti-Semitic ideology and anti-Semitic laws. Belief in eugenics, euthanasia, racial hierarchy.
-Himmler's Posen speech and others, speaks of extermination of the Jews as a dark secret.
-Goebbels diary says 60% of the Jews would probably have to be "liquidated."
-Hitler, in his last will and testament, says he made good on his promise (which he made repeatedly) that "the real culprits would have to pay for their guilt," i.e., the Jews would be made to pay for starting another war.
-Eichmann's confessions, including recordings from before he was in Israeli custody (which would nullify most of the common revisionist arguments about forced confessions etc).

Einsatzgruppen
-Huge amount of documentary evidence. The OSRs, 180-L, PS-212, Jager report, etc.
-Confessions of Ohlendorf, Blobel, and others.

Euthanasia
-Euthanasia program well-documented and not disputed.
-NMT Case I evidence, including confessions of Brack, along with documentary evidence such as NO-205, NO-365, NO-249
-Confessions of Widmann and Nebe at later trials.
-T4 personnel reassigned to AR program.

Gassings
-Gas vans: PS-501, Just document
-Pressac's criminal traces. Morgues outfitted with gas tight doors, etc.
-Kremer Diary
-Testimonies by Hoess and many others.
-Trace amounts of cyanide in Auschwitz wall samples suggests some exposure to HCN.

Philosophical Points
-That the Soviets, Americans, British, etc exaggerated things for propaganda and made many inaccurate claims does not mean the Germans were innocent. By analogy, if a prosecutor presents planted evidence or engages in misconduct, that does not necessarily mean the defendant is innocent.
-Many of the less supportable claims such as 4M at Auschwitz and the soap factories and other easy targets for revisionists had already long been discounted by orthodox scholars like Hilberg and Reitlinger pretty early on.
-The standards of evidence demanded by revisionists is far higher than what would ordinarily be demanded. Few genocides and other atrocities could be demonstrated to the degree revisionists demand, yet surely things like this have and do happen. This overly skeptical approach will generally bias you toward disbelieving atrocity stories in general even though atrocities are common.
-Circumstantially, if we have a regime known to be anti-Semitic, if we know they gathered up Jews and sent them off to unknown locations, and if we have large populations drops, the standard explanation that was generally accepted at the time becomes the most probable. The alternative explanation would have required falsification of demographic and immigration data, tremendous amounts of false testimony, and forgery of documents.

That there would be value in such a book goes without saying. There has been a major need for this for around fifty years (since Hoax of the Twentieth Century). Nor should such a book be inordinately hard to write if the evidence is as abundant as claimed. That such a book does not exist is therefore inexplicable and highly revealing. Somebody would have written it by now.

I believe there is a desire (whether conscious or subconscious) on your side to keep your position ill-defined and amorphous. If you were to say, "here is a book with our best arguments and evidence, summarized in a readable 300 pages for the intelligent general reader," the problem with this is that it would give revisionists an identifiable target which could then be demolished.

[Callafangers]

This is a bad example, since you advanced a purported "historical hypothesis" while apparently ignorant of what happened to the dead from Napoleonic battlefields and in particular, the Battle of Waterloo. [...continues with a huge essay on Waterloo...]

Amazing -- seven paragraphs on the Battle of Waterloo which I only threw in as a generic example. I could have said the 'Battle of Fart-knockers' -- would you have given seven paragraphs about this one, too?

Here is the point: wherever the corpses for the Battle of Waterloo are buried, dissolved, etc.; the modern assertion is that they ended up at X location(s). If there are hundreds more such corpses found at Y location(s), this previous assertion has been falsified (at least, in part). Since the claim that "the corpses of the Battle of Waterloo all ended up at X location(s)" could be demonstrated as false (if indeed false), this aspect validates the claim (or at least does not invalidate it).

Here's another example: historians Polybius and Livy record the Battle of Cannae as a defeat leading to 50,000+ Roman casualties, buried in a "valley near Cannae". While modern history accepts this assessment as true, detailed excavations of all valleys near Cannae resulting in no Roman corpses could falsify this claim, just as could explicit and more authoritative records suggesting this battle likely occurred elsewhere, or similar.

The point is that: the processes by which the determination of 50,000+ casualties at a Cannae valley has been made are subject to rigorous assessment and [re-]evaluation. This is an important condition. From Popper, describing the faults of Marxist history (also reminiscent of 'Holocaust' historiography):

The Marxist theory of history, in spite of the serious efforts of some of its founders and followers, ultimately adopted this soothsaying practice. In some of its earlier formulations (for example in Marx's analysis of the character of the ‘coming social revolution’) their predictions were testable, and in fact falsified. 2 Yet instead of accepting the refutations the followers of Marx re-interpreted both the theory and the evidence in order to make them agree. In this way they rescued the theory from refutation; but they did so at the price of adopting a device which made it irrefutable. They thus gave a ‘conventionalist twist’ to the theory; and by this stratagem they destroyed its much advertised claim to scientific status.

Popper, K. (1967). Conjectures and Refutations, p. 37. https://archive.org/details/karl-popper ... 7/mode/2up

Try as you might, it is inescapable that a theory or claim must be subjected to falsification in order to retain its claim to validity. Any tactics, framing, etc., which limit or eliminate the vulnerability of a given claim to falsification (or attempts to falsify) renders it invalid. The example of Marxist history above shows that even with direct falsification, the narrative is simply reshaped like some kind of jelly filling a new container -- this invalidates it. Other Marxist tactics have included censorship -- another invalidating practice. Other tactics can include providing a conclusion whose methodological determination is obscured or only partially revealed -- this means it cannot be tested/falsified, hence invalidated. While some claims are vague by necessity (e.g. 50,000+ Romans at some 'valley near Cannae'), we still accept these claims because the evidence thus far points in one direction, is lacking challenge or controversy, and to the extent such a controversy ever comes to exist, it can be settled via testing (falsification potential).

Science in general is about making predictions and then testing those predictions. With the claim of gassings or burials at any location, you are necessarily predicting certain traces of evidence being there. Without these predictions being thoroughly testable (i.e. falsifiable) by all available means, there is no reasonable claim to validity, period. Censorship, persecution, distraction/deflection ("mass graves aren't important -- where are the missing Jews?!"), etc. are all practices meant to prevent or diminish the role of testing and subjection to falsification.

Per Popper's principles, this invalidates the 'Holocaust'. Same goes with Carl Sagan's framework, see: viewtopic.php?t=308

Maybe you can clarify how one can 'falsify' all the sources to big events like this, the battle of Waterloo, etc. To whether the event as a whole happened - not whether the course of it or extent of it needs revising, because the latter is perfectly normal. I mean things like claiming Stalingrad was never bombed in the last ten days of August 1942, or that no Jews were deported from the Netherlands in 1942-44.

Falsification (in practice) for major events means rigorous (reasonable maximum) source criticism from top-to-bottom, and specific, feasible (or at least conceivable) means and processes which certainly could, if the evidence is false or unsubstantiated at any level, demonstrate/expose it as such. Where specific claims can be measured for confirmation/refutation (e.g. precise locations of alleged corpse burials), such claims must be open for examination. To the precise extent such claims are not falsifiable (i.e. cannot be tested, limitations on access or subjection to criticism and open refutation), they are invalidated. Valid claims entail necessary inferences (i.e. all other possibilities than the conclusion/inference have been ruled out). When falsification in-practice is limited or prohibited, validation is absent. Hence, the claim is invalid.

The in-principle falsifiability of missing persons cases doesn't mean that missing status is automatically falsified just on someone's say-so or because they really, really want it to be true. There isn't an obligation to instruct 'revisionists' on genealogy research and how one might trace people through the WWII records, postwar tracing services (Arolsen archives etc), immigration records and so on. There probably isn't much point trying this route, but it is how one in-principle could falsify someone's missing person status. One could even try a comparison with other known groups of missing persons, like German soldiers who perished in 1944-45.

This might be as remote as the theoretical possibility that all the sources for the battle of Waterloo could be 'falsified'.

The claim that 'millions of Jews are missing' has never been falsifiable as the demographic data alone is inadequate for a deductive approach to be taken, here. Moreover, the sources of much of this data are suspect and have remained closed-off to intense scrutiny (overtly/undeniably so in the case of the 'Iron Curtain'). The lack of validation for 'missing Jews', therefore, extends far beyond even just the matter of falsifiability. It has never stood-up to begin with (i.e. not even 'verification').

[bombsaway]

This is the way to move the debate forward. Which I don't think you want. Imo it's the "dialogue" as you call it that's mostly a waste of time.

...

That there would be value in such a book goes without saying. There has been a major need for this for around fifty years (since Hoax of the Twentieth Century). Nor should such a book be inordinately hard to write if the evidence is as abundant as claimed. That such a book does not exist is therefore inexplicable and highly revealing. Somebody would have written it by now.

I believe there is a desire (whether conscious or subconscious) on your side to keep your position ill-defined and amorphous. If you were to say, "here is a book with our best arguments and evidence, summarized in a readable 300 pages for the intelligent general reader," the problem with this is that it would give revisionists an identifiable target which could then be demolished.

What do you mean by moving the debate forward? There isn't a single persuasive revisionist argument and you guys think the same thing about orthodoxy. This is where the debate falls apart, where it get stuck, and why it is unproductive.

I don't need a thousand words to describe why revisionism is intellectually bankrupt. Here I'll do it: the orthodox narrative is evidenced in a multitude of ways, the revisionist narrative (whether resettlement or "Hoax" is not).

There is a book that revisionists can read that introduces the subject https://dn790001.ca.archive.org/0/items ... ersies.pdf

The first 300 pages lay out the evidence, looking at both high level policy and what was happening on the ground. The focus isn't really on the Reinhardt camps at this point, rather creating a chronology. Auschwitz gets mentioned hundreds of times.

You can run it through an LLM and summarize to make more concise, this is a non issue.

And MGK did "demolish" it, or so it has been claimed. They withdrew their critique though, I don't know how you feel about that.