viewtopic.php?t=218
Here I would like to address an argument that Nessie has made repeatedly. Nessie claims that it doesn't matter that the Soviets were unreliable because legit, independent investigations were done by the Poles. This argument is so bad that it's really not worth responding to. But since he repeats it so frequently, I figured I will make a thread for it.
My actual argument is of course, more complicated than Archie frames it. It starts with the point that it was not the Soviets who initiated and produced the earliest and majority of wartime reports on the existence of death camps, it was the Poles and Slovakians. Those reports came from a combination of escaped prisoners from the camps, and people who lived nearby to them. Revisionists try to frame the Soviets as being responsible, as even they cannot believe the Poles and Slovakians could run a hoax to fool the world.
As for reliability, all wartime reports should be regarded as unlikely to be reliable, no matter where they come from. Reliability is established later, once enquiries have been made to trace and verify evidence and produce a chronology of events. A British intelligence chief, Victor Cavendish-Bentinck, is widely quoted by revisionists, for his 1943 memo that disbelieved the Polish reports about gassings. By 1945, and the end of the war, he was the UK Ambassador to Poland and he accepted the evidence gas chambers did exist.
Even if the Poles and Slovakians are more reliable than the Soviets, that does not mean their claims, such as the Vrba-Wetzler Report on Auschwitz, does not need to be checked and verified.
A major confusion Nessie has is that he thinks Poland was independent of the Soviet Union and does not understand that Poland had fallen under Soviet control by the time the camps were "liberated." He frequently conflates the Polish government in-exile in London with the emerging Communist government. The government in-exile was about a thousand miles away from Poland during the relevant period and they never regained power.
The majority of the reports, starting in 1941, came via the Government in Exile, which was independent of the Soviet Union and many of its members were in opposition to the Communists. I have not conflated the two. That the Communists gained power after the war, and they supported the Soviet claims, does not mean that the earlier intelligence reports were subject to Soviet influence. Archie has made a chronological error.
His next chronological error is to ignore the collapse of the Soviet Union and that the Polish government still accepted that death camps had existed. If it was a Soviet hoax that the Poles had helped to promote, it would have been exposed to embarrass the Soviets, as happened over Katyn. Then there is the issue of the report that came from the exiled Slovakian government in 1944.
Already we can see that this idea of independent "Polish" investigations is a complete fantasy.
The Polish Government in Exile, the post war Communists and the post Soviet governments, along with the Soviets, all agreed that there had been death camps. Those claims still need to be checked. The method of checking is the same as if the claims had been made by the Americans or British.
Sanity Check - "Thus, currently revisionists can console themselves by affirming their incredulity..."
