Why "the hoax" would necessitate a conspiracy involving hundreds of thousands

[SanityCheck]

All of the above is a very verbose way of saying: "it's okay that our information has been utterly false at numerous instances which were never formally acknowledged as such (as in, allowing revisionism a stronger platform) -- history takes awhile to calibrate when crossing national borders!"

Of course it does, and this is also tied in rather directly to archives being accessible, along with when a critical mass of studies of one aspect interacting with another emerge.

The comparator examples of Stalinist violence and Soviet war losses were substantially inaccessible before circa 1990; only in the 1990s did information and access to previously closed archives become available. The outline of the phenomena were knowable, accuracy was impossible.

The end of the Cold War and accompanying further declassifications outside the former East Bloc meant that numbers and nuances fort he Holocaust, especially for Eastern Europe, could be checked properly and estimates refined. It's therefore not a surprise that after 1990, numbers for western Europe as well as Czechoslovakia hardly budged, since they could be researched fairly well from an early stage, whereas numbers involving Eastern Europe were revised and refined, even if there were many prescient estimates (such as Reitlinger and Hilberg rejecting the Auschwitz 4M for 1 million or less).

The revisions were refinements in breaking down numbers that were available already - thus Hilberg's numbers in 1961 were not that far off the mark, despite being based on significantly less sources than were available by the 21st Century. The clarifications of camps turned out to be also quite close to his estimates.

In the case of Hungarian Jewish fates, itineraries and losses, one problem was the relatively slow emergence of systematic 'KZ studies'. Monographs on the individual camps and camp complexes in the west were slow to appear: by 1980 there were reasonably decent studies of Belsen (1962), Dachau (1975) and Mauthausen (circa 1978). The ITS Arolsen was sitting on a wealth of documentation but closed for researchers on both sides of the Iron Curtain by the late 1970s/early 1980s. It had exchanged documentation with KZ museums and research centres before this, as is visible in the expanded references to Danuta Czech's Kalendarium for Auschwitz between the 1960s version and the 1989 version.

KZs on the eastern side of the Iron Curtain attracted attention from East German and Polish researchers, and indeed some Polish historians wrote on Dachau as well as Gusen in the west. But the East Germans were more interested in emphasising antifascist resistance of especially communists, the Poles were writing in Polish for the most part.

Reviewing earlier histories of the Holocaust, there is a relative neglect of the final phase in 1944-45 beyond a brief outline. Reitlinger and Hilberg published at a time when there were as good as no KZ histories (for the camps in Germany and Austria). One reason might be that the Nuremberg documents skewed to the higher end of the WVHA, and the underlying source base, the US-captured German records, didn't include the camp-specific records. Only some of those were in the US, others had gravitated to ITS Arolsen or remained behind in Europe.

Most typical expositions of the Holocaust in Hungary (I checked as examples the Eichmann trial judgement, Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem and Nora Levin's 1968 book The Holocaust) rapidly become entranced with the negotiations, stop order, rescue efforts and Budapest. Having deported over 400,000 Jews to Auschwitz, they did not stop to consider what happened next. This might be seen as an 'Eichmann bias' reinforcing the view from the German Foreign Office (since the key documents used earlier were from Foreign Office files).

Over the 1980s, 1990s and into the 21st Century, German and Austrian researchers substantially developed KZ studies, reformed the archives of museums especially if taken over from the DDR, and published more monographs. The bigger books for Neuengamme, as an example, appeared in 1986, 1991 and then an exhaustive study of the sub-camp system in 2009. This followed the German encyclopedia of the KZs which appeared largely between 2006 and 2009. USHMM's Encyclopedia volume on the WVHA camps also appeared in 2009. Updated studies of Majdanek, Stutthof and Gross-Rosen didn't appear until the 1990s.

The situation with Auschwitz was not significantly different. The museum published a thicker book in the mid-1980s, in the 1960s and 1970s most of its publications were in the journal or on partial aspects. Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death Camp appeared as a collaborative collection in 1994, after Pressac and Piper's revision of the death toll, but with Hilberg and Braham repeating claims that would be regarded within a few years as firmly wrong. The museum's own five volume Auschwitz 1940-1945 appeared in Polish and German editions thereafter, and in English in 2000.

Laszlo Varga in the chapter on Hungary in Dimension des Völkermords in 1991 arrived at figures for total deportations (not just to Auschwitz) and survivors therefore deaths - half a million deported, 380,000 deaths, without breaking this down for the 400+K Auschwitz number and how many therefore had been selected for work or survived. Tamas Stark published a study in the 1990s in Hungarian, translated to English in 2000, which arrived at similar results from purely demographic (pre-deportation, post-war) considerations, again without focusing on the specific Auschwitz calculation.

Gerlach and Aly in their 2002 book Das letzte Kapitel included a chapter entitled 'two hundred thousand odysseys', referring to the 110,000 selected for work at Auschwitz and the up to 90,000 taken to Germany and Austria directly. This pulled together what was obvious from the 1980s-1990s KZ studies, fresh sources and also masses of 1945 affidavits which enabled them to follow the deportees through their itineraries and odysseys putting individual experiences to statistics derived from transport lists, camp records and the KZ studies presenting them.

The new sources included the Glaser list identifying how many male deportees arriving at Birkenau were given KZ clothing, which showed 55,000 Hungarian Jewish men so clothed, and provided a contrasting set of data to the Auschwitz registrations from the 'Depot' (which had been known from 1944 to be later than the usual tattooing immediately after arrival).

This was just one of many revisions and refinements that the mainstream put forward in the 1990s and 2000s. Nearly all of the revisions that are complained about and argued over here, from Piper rejecting the 4M Auschwitz death toll for just over 1 million, the Hoefle telegram in 2002, Kranz's revisions to Majdanek death toll in the mid-2000s, happened in this twenty year period. So did others: this was when post-Soviet historians in Russia, Belarus and Ukraine revised totals for the now independent republics, and when post-Soviet demographers revisited the overall total based on newly available sources and data.

But also for other non-Holocaust death tolls: the extent of the UPA ethnic cleansing of Poles in Volhynia and Galicia was mostly argued out in this period, the Red Army losses were given official figures in the mid-1990s (and then disputed), GULag deaths and executions in the Great Terror were known only from the early 1990s, various revisions and reassessments of war losses and their breakdowns (who killed whom) for Yugoslavia happened as well in the 1990s and 2000s. There was also renewed scrutiny of the death toll in the Heimatvertreibungen, while Ruediger Overmans revisited German military casualties with a major study using very large samples of the card index material in 2000. Richard Overy reviewed contemporary exaggerations of deaths in bombing raids in Europe during WWII and synthesised now available reports and statistics in The Bombing War in 2013. A number were lowered as a result.

One might add also that the Chinese official rounded numbers for the Nanjing massacre were scrutinised by western historians in the 2000s, and not taken literally. The same has followed for Rwanda and Bangladesh in the past 15 years, scrutinising 'rounded' memorialising numbers and arguing for lower totals.

Your interpretation relies on assumption that sincerity has remained a constant in historical investigation and inquiry. It hasn't. We know it hasn't; to give one example is Bernard Mark, former director of the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw, known for having falsified multiple documents, and thereafter retaining his position at the Institute until his death. Just how many 'Bernard Marks' are/were out there? Has there been any serious auditing or efforts to control actors like these, within the broader field of Holocaust historiography? No -- much like a lack of cross-examination on 'Holocaust' testimony in general, those physically holding the history (archives, etc.) and those writing it have had basically free reign to produce, omit, or even manipulate anything and everything they saw fit. Whether Soviet communists or embittered Jews, to manipulate records was unpunished and seemingly encouraged, so long as it assisted the 'denazification' effort and victors' postwar socio-political schemes.

On the contrary, there's been so much revisiting and reassessment that we have a very good idea of the biases at work. This is where the points about archival access, declassification, the expiry of Thirty Year Rules, the opening of East European archives, their microfilming for USHMM and Yad Vashem, and digitisation in Poland and elsewhere all come in.

Bernard Mark was editing documents to give a pro-communist spin while also downplaying Polish complicity. There are other examples of this known, such as the editing of the published version of Calel Perechodnik's wartime manuscript to make Polish complicity less conspicuous, which were spotted decades ago. David Engel wrote about this in 1999, a new complete Polish edition appeared in the 2000s.

There's been intensive interest in the early historiography of the Holocaust as well as in historical commissions, the fate of archives and of course the postwar investigations and trials, so the biases displayed in the early decades, the gaps and blindspots, are much discussed in the academic literature. The same process of revisiting earlier generations' interpretations, knowledge and blind spots has also happened for Sovietology, and 'contemporary history' in general.

Rechecking the files and archives for the documents mentioned or cited without clear references in official histories (like the British and US official histories), or which appeared in early document editions, has been at the heart of critical 1930s-1940s, WWII-era historiography since at the latest the mid-1970s. It is a drawn-out process requiring a lot of researchers to revisit the relevant materials.

For the Holocaust, the steps included relocating the Nuremberg documents in the overall mass of western-captured German records, then the 1940s-1960s sources used in East Bloc cases (or submitted at IMT or passed to the west) or published then. A wrinkle is that some documents were copied to intermediary archives. The Vergasungskeller memo was a Nuremberg document, then Pressac located it in Auschwitz Museum files for his 1989 book, but these were copies of the ZBL Auschwitz archive, so his 1993 book relocated it, then the entire collection was copied and microfilmed so the original file context could be seen, not long afterwards.

There will always be a residue of published sources, especially published diaries and memoirs, which might not be so easily 'recheckable', for all topics. But the archiving of personal papers means that we *can* check much more easily now.

It's funny to me that those in your camp can embrace concepts like "work towards the Fuhrer" (Ian Kershaw's hypothesis of German administrative structure) as explaining any of the gaps in documentation you find, yet you cannot fathom something as simple as the various anti-German actors postwar converging as to "work against the Fuhrer".

Weird.

'Working towards the Fuehrer' hasn't been applied in that way. In the context of the origins of the Final Solution debate it has a place to make sense of extant documents but also affidavits and testimonies filling in the gaps between extant documents. It isn't used to explain an absence of evidence (since there is no total absence to be explained).

Your hypothesis of postwar actors converging to 'work against the Fuehrer' requires a much larger canvas than the Holocaust, since postwar actors were investigating, prosecuting and writing histories about the whole of WWII and Third Reich, while making heavy use of the accounts of former Nazis, German officers and other German ego-documents.

First you have to establish what is really different about the Holocaust qua extermination of the Jews to the rest.

And already that is borked, because the major distortion in the Cold War was a de-Judaising, universalising assertion of 4 million people murdered at Auschwitz, at the very least subconsciously if not deliberately taking the camp away from the Holocaust to general Nazi murderousness. It wasn't done because of Jewish investigators or historians, a number of whom rejected it *for Jews* from the 1940s onwards (Nachman Blumental, then Reitlinger and Hilberg, and despite serious errors even Georges Wellers in the 1980s)

And so the moral of the story is: since the tale of "hundreds of tanks" was initially told, this inflated figure easily carried through the official history until many decades later, once a handful of dispersed documentation converged to show lower figures. If these archives had been first raided and controlled for decades by people steadfast on getting the world to believe in "hundreds of tanks", do you still think this truth (of fewer tanks) would have ever been uncovered? Or would historians today be insisting still that the "hundreds of tanks" is legitimate, since there is no documentation left explicitly showing otherwise?

No, it carried through the popular histories in the west, as well as some academic histories in the west. The closest to an official history in the west would be Ernst Klink's 1960s book on Kursk, which was produced under the auspices of the MGFA research department of the Bundeswehr. No other history mentioning Kursk or Prokhorovka in the west could be 'official'. Soviet historiography had an official slant and produced multi-volume official histories which included this otherwise unsourced claim.

The sneers about official history and 'court historians' made sense when the US government - state and defense departments and subordinate branches - was contracting out to historians, or hiring government-employed historians, to produce histories on the basis of still-classified archives. As soon as archives are declassified, in principle anyone can use them, whether a hobbyist, author with trade press contract or a university academic. None are then 'official historians'.

The Soviet Union had not captured the bulk of German military records, their captured documents collection now at the Russian military archive in Podolsk (and presented digitally at German Documents in Russia) were a smaller slice. But all East Bloc states as well as Soviet republics purchased microfilm copies of the US NARA RG 242 Captured German Records to greater or lesser extents. One can see the references to these all over East German, Polish and some Soviet historiography. Whether that included the military records from Kursk is unclear. If they did make copies, they had been overlooked. The Soviet authorities could hardly suppress records they did not control.



Your hypothesis about some general anti-German conspiracy to sieve the archives and presumably, remove documents which you badly wish existed to prove a contrary thesis (such as 'resettlement') is wildly improbable. Firstly, the records ended up in the archives of a dozen or more European states, the Germans left behind undestroyed documents in multiple countries. In Germany the same happened at regional level. Secondly, what was captured was visibly incomplete, and working through the piles took decades of cataloguing and research. Thirdly, the *state* level archiving was universalist. This goes back to not isolating the Holocaust from other aspects of the Third Reich and WWII.

You are assuming deliberate state level interest in manipulating the historical record, when the actual picture is of relative indifference to the Holocaust in the 1940s and 1950s (the crucial time frame for especially the US-captured documents). This is well attested for the Soviet Union, who suppressed the Black Book and the Jewish Antifascist Committe in the latter part of the 1940s.

The converse argument, of states inserting forgeries into files or a chain of custody, also relies too much on reading contemporary interest backwards onto the 1940s and 1950s. It further dodges the question of what else might have been forged about crimes against non-Jews and other key Nazi policies, so once again the narrowing to the Holocaust or gassings is not persuasive. What was forged? There needs to be a stable position from revisionists on this, rather than the ad hoc make-it-up-as-you-go-along immunisation strategy of vague insinuations. And why if documents were forged, were potential key documents like a Hitler order or more documents about gassing not forged?

The main way in which you are a prisoner of your culture is imbuing greater significance to gassing than was the case in the 1940s, as well as to the extermination of the Jews.

The Soviets were already universalising Nazi crimes during the war, their acknowledgement of Jews as victims was inconsistent from the get-go. They highlighted the use of gas vans against psychiatric patients and Soviet partisans/resistance members in 1943, the highlighting of gas van use against Jews was made elsewhere, in some of Ilya Ehrenburg's articles, based on eyewitness reports from fugitives.

You've repeatedly tried to claim that the Soviets covered up resettlement camps of Jews deep into the Soviet Union and Poland, presumably to defer gratification about discovering extermination camps in Poland which were 'actually' transit camps of some kind. But there was no state interest on the part of the Soviet Union in doing this, nor any propaganda interest since liberated resettlement camps would have been *bad*, considering all parameters of German policies, the conditions of other camps for POWs, Soviet civilians, and the range of Jewish work-ghettos, labour camps and predominantly Jewish KZs.

Western views up to the UN Declaration in December 1942 were that lots of deportees were dying, somehow. There were estimates of up to 50%, not 75-80%. Even after news arrived from Poland about the Aktion Reinhardt camps, many Jewish organisations clung to 2-3 million dead. Raphael Lemkin relied on Hitler's Ten Year War on the Jews, published in summer 1943 with 3 million estimated, and cut the figure in half for Axis Rule in Occupied Europe. Its publication was delayed by almost a year so by the time it appeared in December 1944, Lemkin had absorbed other reports and was clearer on the extent of the carnage.

To find out that there had been more survivors than had been feared would have been fine with the postwar world. Nothing about a specific number can be seen as decisive in any of the concrete outcomes after 1945. The numbers weren't even stated in several of them (such as the final UN resolution on partitioning Mandate Palestine, or the German-Israeli reparations agreement, premised on survivors not the dead). Decades of repetition might have made 'six million' central to western culture, but this is where the lowball calculation of Reitlinger at 4.2+ million, repeated by Bullock and Arendt, shows that the 1940s-1950s were not as fixated on the number as deniers (and others) are today.

So for an overworked archivist to know that finding a report on a German resettlement camp for deported Jews in the RK Ostland or RK Ukraine, or anywhere, somehow contradicted a cast-iron line is just not plausible. Especially if the report then accounted for mortality or complained at food supply difficulties, epidemics and so on.

The "overall outcome" of Jews in WW2 is that they won the war, coordinated much of Allied postwar 'reconstruction' and retaliation, tightly-controlled data surrounding their population movement, and became the "world's greatest victims". There's your outcome.

This is where the lack of any follow-up to Sanning's now forty-two year old book is a big problem for revisionism - but also one that might best be left vague, since the available data doesn't allow for the insinuations and fudging that earlier deniers relied on.

The aftermath of 1945 was already clear in outline before Sanning tried misrepresenting it and doing his mystery-mongering. Since then the range of archives and records opened makes it entirely worthless, with a massive number of publications. Themes include: Jewish survivors rebuilding their lives in their home countries, Displaced Persons, the repatriations of internees, POWs and workers in general, and specific Jewish groups like the 1940 deportees sent to Central Asia repatriated in 1945-6 to Poland who then largely emigrated and ended up in DP camps, immigration to the US, UK, Canada and elsewhere plus immigration to Israel.

There is no lack of parallel studies of Polish, Ukrainian, Baltic and even Russian displaced persons and emigrants, as well as the repatriation of Soviet citizens in 1945-6.

Arolsen opening its archives and putting much of them online happened a while back now. The now expanded literature makes use of community and state records, and maps these to personal accounts. There are name lists for Poland as well as for Soviet deportations in 1940-41 and evacuations in 1941-2.

I assume much of this reference to the historiographical development of other narratives is meant to show some [false] equivalence to what should be expected of the 'Holocaust'. But no, this would be a fallacy.

The Soviet Union was not 'conquered'. It always had a choice of which records to preserve or not. It's collapse may have entailed some 'inconvenient' records escaping into publication but this does not shed light on 'Holocaust' sources which have an entirely different range of motives, actors/'witnesses', custodial chains, and other circumstances involved -- a major departure in terms of scope, scale, and overall nature, compared to records of internal Soviet atrocities from different periods and initiatives.

No, the case of Soviet losses in war and peace shows that expecting absolute precision in the Cold War is deeply naive. If we had no idea about the Red Army's battlefield casualties, GULag deaths, executions in the Terror until the 1990s why should we expect, from our vantage point of 2025 thirty five years after the end of the Cold War, that all numbers and fates discussed before 1990 would be absolute perfection?

You keep things vague about Soviet history, historiography and the records, without ever demonstrating the slightest knowledge of what *was* revealed, what could be known in different republics (since Ukraine et al did become independent after 1991), and how the Soviet system worked.

As I've said before, there is no trace of 'missing' Jews in the sources available for the GULag, GUVPI and the 'special settlements, which covers the entire range of options for captivity and exile in the 1940s-1950s after the war. There are conversely traces of Polish Jews who never were anywhere near an extermination camp being repatriated in 1945 to the west, from Central Asia and Siberia as well as from eastern Poland, and traces of other Jews caught up elsewhere (eg arrested as a member of the Hungarian Labour Service, or a couple of 'suspicious' German Jewish survivors of the Minsk ghetto).

The possibility that the Soviets repatriated or allowed to emigrate more than they actually did can be rejected as this no longer involves Soviet records - the records of the DP camp system and immigration records outside the USSR would now be what counted.

The possibility that the Soviets kept onto foreign Jews badly wishing to return home and perhaps forced them to change nationality has no evidence. The numbers for foreign nationals in the systems of exile and captivity don't allow for this anyway.

Why some Jews were 'kept' when Primo Levi and other Jews liberated at Auschwitz and elsewhere by the Soviets were repatriated in 1945 hasn't seemingly been considered, much less explained.

The possibility that Soviet forces bumped off Jews surviving otherwise unknown resettlement camps also has no evidence, and at least some is needed before anyone need consider this more than a delusional fantasy.

Why wasn't any of this noted in the personal accounts - diaries, letters, memoirs, oral histories and other accounts - of Soviet veterans, including Soviet Jewish veterans? As a nationality with above average rates of literacy and education, Soviet Jews have left above-average numbers of diaries, letters and personal accounts, while Soviet Russians and other nationalities are not so far behind. Presumably these collections, which include ones held well outside the former Soviet Union due to waves of emigration opportunities, were added to the tediously large pile of collections that had to be monitored for wrongthink.

The inability to locate the missing Jews in 1942-44 or to specify or estimate their mortality is the real problem. Given stated Nazi policies and radical discrimination around rationing plus well-documented shortages and patterns of starvation among non-Jews in circumstances where they were concentrated, there is no reason to assume that any of the 'missing' Jews would have been alive by mid-1944 to be liberated (especially in the northern half of the front, in the Ostland and Army Groups North and Centre), nor any evidence that any were actually alive to be liberated. Why advancing Soviet propagandists and writers including Ehrenburg and Grossman would have travelled 1600 km from Stalingrad to Treblinka and missed any signs of 'resettled' Jewish life that had died out under the tender care of the Nazis is entirely unclear to me.

What does it take to be a 'serious historian', exactly? You've mentioned this more than once, and it's been chopped-down easily at each instance.

To be considered a historian, one just needs to write about the past. Whether the history is any good or not will be in the eye of the beholder, so while Jacob Rees-Mogg technically wrote history in publishing a book about some eminent Victorians, it had bad reviews, some pointing out he had not really used primary sources.

The historiography of an era or topic consists of everything written about it from the time it happened onwards - so it will include contemporary publications, works written by journalists and by protagonists. Alan Moorehead's African trilogy was published during the war, he was a journalist . His daughter Caroline Moorehead also became a journalist and popular historian without ever belonging to a university, her books on the past are also histories.

A genre of history writing might be identifiable by who researched and wrote them and for what purpose. The authors of divisional and unit histories in the Wehrmacht and Waffen-SS were generally veterans, with only a few having studied history to university level, many did archival research once records became available, they usually solicited or received personal accounts, some may have done interviews. US and British unit histories were similarly mostly written by veterans and increasing numbers used oral history or the crowd-sourcing of accounts.

These methods are not in principle that different to the ones used by Cornelius Ryan, a journalist, when writing his books about D-Day, Operation Market-Garden and the battle of Berlin. Ryan solicited and received accounts, he made use of existing publications, and he did interviews. He published A Bridge Too Far precisely when the British military records for 1944 were declassified, in 1974. There isn't much indication that he used any of them, the time to publication was too short from the start of the year for this to have happened.


A field of history is a different matter. It's not really possible until there is access to archives. Histories can have been written earlier by journalists and others, and pioneering historians, but until the archives are substantially available, the classic pre-1945 sense of academic history isn't possible.

There was a field of Third Reich history in Germany and also for the US and UK from the 1960s onwards, once the US microfilms were available and once the files had been restituted to West Germany.

There was a nascent field of Polish Jewish historiography of the Holocaust from 1945, since the Central Jewish Historical Commission had collected archival collections, had access to more, and had gathered its own sources by recording accounts. The few trained historians (such as Philip Friedman) emigrated from Poland soon after this, joining others who had settled in Israel (with Yad Vashem) or in the US (with especially YIVO in New York). The Jewish historiography of the Holocaust started before the 'Nuremberg' version.

Checking on their work, as with the work of Cold War era Soviet and East Bloc historians (on anything), wasn't fully possible until after 1990. Some things could be checked, since Yad Vashem and YIVO had received copies of materials remaining in Poland, and some research trips to Poland were possible.

US historians of the Soviet Union could start to write history in the latter stages of the Cold War, since some were permitted to visit Moscow and other cities with archives, and given limited access to archival files. On various topics they could rely on non-Soviet sources, so the field of Soviet history was substantially hamstrung until glasnost developed into the opening of more of the archives.

Earlier Sovietologists tended to be political scientists even when using historical sources, such as the German-captured Smolensk oblast archive, like Merle Fainsod in 1958. J. Arch Getty revisited the same collection, long accessible at NARA on microfilm, among other sources, in his 1979 PhD in history. Getty was still very limited until after the Cold War so his really significant publications are post-1990. (He incidentally just passed away on May 19, 2025, aged 74.)

The field of Soviet studies thus became more historical even before the USSR passed into history; after 1991 it gravitated almost entirely to history departments, as any politics, sociology and economics departments would be more concerned about contemporary post-Soviet states, economies and societies.

Whether archival access, social support, financial or legal considerations, etc., there are maximum disincentives to challenge the 'Holocaust' narrative, and it is nearly impossible to make a successful career out of it. Mattogno has been fortunate to come from a family with some wealth, at least enough that he could essentially focus full-time on revisionism without having to generate income any other way. This is not going to be the case for 99% of would-be revisionists, and of those that could afford it financially, the many other personal/social incentives are enough to dissuade the remainder.

Your emphasis on a lack of 'serious historians' on the revisionist side comes off as a desperate, transparent cheap-shot. You know the reasons why revisionism lacks individuals with this degree of commitment (you'd surely admit more incentives means more people would be doing it), yet you still nonetheless keep presenting this condition as though it is evidence of revisionism lacking in evidence or valid interpretation. It comes off as a shameless and intellectually dishonest cheap-shot; I cannot think of another way to describe it.

It's anything but. I routinely point to a large number of amateur researchers into the Third Reich, WWII and Holocaust eras, who pursue their interest in many cases as hobbyists, without immediate hope of a big payday from a best-selling book. They invest a substantial portion of their income in buying books, making research trips and a lot of their time debating their interests then writing about it.

In the history of revisionism, there *have* been researchers who did their work while pursuing other careers. Butz *did* go to the US National Archives and consult various libraries while holding down a job as a professor of electrical engineering. It's just that his samplings and the haste with which he went into print look in retrospect to have been shallow and premature. A dedicated amateur researcher would as the book blurbs often say have spent xyz years researching their topic.

David Irving had the good fortune to turn his research into a full-time writing career for his adult working life, and even survived being turned away from conventional publishers to adapt to self-publishing, while also coping with an eventual ban from the German archives - the US archives have copies, and USHMM even more. So it's not a surprise that Irving was seen researching in USHMM some time ago.

Walendy, Faurisson, Weber, Crowell and others also made use of archives in their writings, to varying degrees. Graf accompanied Mattogno on archive trips in the 1990s. This puts them in a different category to Thomas Dalton, who uses only published sources. Germar Rudolf, Willy Wallwey and others evidently shared a big bunch of copies of ZBL Auschwitz archive documents among themselves.

I'm quite sympathetic to the logistical issues since I started researching without any affilation, and held down a more than full-time job in the first years of my postgraduate studies, being enrolled part-time.

That doesn't exempt the revisionist researchers above from criticism. Faurisson was much less well read than he pretended by the time he went public; his writings in the 1980s and 1990s show that he wasn't keeping up, while Carlo Mattogno was forging ahead. This despite Faurisson having some de facto sabbatical years when he was redirected to remote teaching, and having the opportunity to visit the US (where he could not have been turned away from NARA, nor indeed from USHMM) on repeated occasions.

Standing back from the entire history of revisionism, it's clear that Carlo Mattogno is several steps up from any other author and researcher. Which again doesn't exempt him from criticism, since he's been at this for over forty years.

It does mean that his output makes nearly every other revisionist, including his erstwhile co-author Graf, look pretty lame by comparison.

It's also unfortunate that the main active revisionists are stretched so thin. Rudolf has been publisher, editor and translator, which quite understandably reduces the amount of time he has to read and do actual research. Graf passed away and had retired. Dalton was until recently holding down an academic career (by his own admission, and persuasively noted in his website blog of updates - 'been busy teaching' etc). Maybe he now has more time to dig deeper, maybe not.

There are and have been other retirees who can turn more full-time to doing research, and this is also a time-honoured tradition with other amateurs, hobbyists and also published authors. But precisely because others in the same position can get to grips with archives and more, then it's perfectly justified to criticise John Wear, who appears to be large in retirement, for writing endless essays based on secondary literature. The objective measurements of doing research do not cast him in a good light: he is not a coalface researcher, whereas there are thousands of coalface researchers out there working on WWII and other subjects for no pay.

How are you enjoying your salary, Nick? We both have a passionate interest in the exact same events and period in history, yet you are paid handsomely for it, praised by impressionable young adults for the 'wisdom' you impart upon them. The rest of us here (revisionists) have to work double-time to make ends meet.

I'm paid to teach modern European history, in practice this means world history, and my experience has genuinely extended into the medieval era (co-teaching comparatively, second marking medieval dissertations and allocating dissertation students as coordinator). I identified as a military historian for a lot of my life and still do in some respects. I'm more identified and involved with comparative violence studies than genocide studies. My interests are probably much broader than yours, but they always have been. And that's also true of the 1933/1939-1945 period plus its aftermath, both for teaching and research.

This may be why it's instinctive for me to recall examples from the battle of Kursk as much as Stalinism in the above. Yes?

[SanityCheck]

On the taxpayer time, no less. Thank you for final calling this out. I wonder if his students know he literally plagiarized hundreds of archival and other sources and lied about having personally accessed them in order to bolster his own credibility when arguing with revisionists. I won't ask about the faculty staff because they obviously have no standards whatsoever.

1) Not strictly speaking the taxpayer, since universities are funded in the UK by fees and have been for quite a long time now. As for 'taxpayer time', we can work flexible hours, but today's a bank holiday, and any time spent posting here is in leisure time as far as I'm concerned. I didn't post here at all for well over two weeks at the end of April/beginning of May, with gaps in April and another two week gap at the end of March/start of April.

2) Not so. I alluded to this in the introduction, but I received around 100,000 pages of documentation from multiple archives and also multiple war crimes investigations/trials, over a year before the white paper appeared, which was hugely relevant for Aktion Reinhardt. This included a wealth of material from the FSB archives Trawniki files which I could not use due to the copying agreement with the institution receiving the files. Some were in the public domain via US denaturalisation court cases, most were not. The other archives included Ludwigsburg, GARF, various Ukrainian and Polish regional and national archives, and many more. There were LOTS of Berlin Document Center personnel files in the collection, as well as numerous Trawniki personnel files from a variety of archives.

In the same year I also visited one of these archives directly. This followed multiple trips to USHMM which accounted for many further references, including many of the Bundesarchiv files, since while I'd visited the Bundesarchiv directly, USHMM also had microfiche copies, the exact same format that one got when the same files doled out in Berlin-Lichterfelde, to help preserve the documents. The multiple trips to USHMM were always paralleled by multiple trips to NARA, thus the bias towards citing from those copies. I had a published and accessible track record with these archives with prior publications and my PhD. Mattogno has since repeatedly cited one of my articles relatively 'factually'.

From 2006-2009 after my PhD and when I was taking an interest in revisionism, there were also the libraries in London for published sources. I will admit I blew the reference for a source in one document edition I copied from the library of UCL-SSEES, but that was down to not looking up the place of publication again. I'd credited the translation for this to Arad anyway. I've since acquired a digital copy of the original in the Polish underground records. The easiest way to prove that one has the collection is of course to cite another document not hitherto known from the literature or source editions. Or provide a link or sign if open access, in a bibliography.

By the time we completed the white paper, there were various open access collections as well, which we used. The Eichmann trial documents were prominent among these. Today a lot of those documents are open access via the German Foreig Office's Political Archive. The main goldmine for our purposes were the Jules Schelvis papers, which we cited from the underlying legal archives since the same legal archives and often the same interrogations were in the 100,000 pages of documents I'd received. Today we'd simply cite from digital copies of Ludwigsburg files (which are not open access, but easily acquired), with any state level papers better cited from Schelvis, since other state archives have at least started to digitise and make some cases open access. So the Hamburg cases are now publicly available, among others.

Mattogno managed to work himself into utter hysterics about this, to the point where he made blatantly nonsensical accusations, in one case accusing us of plagiarising a document from an edited collection chapter which came out after the white paper. In actual fact the author of the chapter saw me using the microfilm collection from the relevant archive at USHMM and recommended I look up the document in question, almost seven years earlier. There were other amusing accusations, and some exasperated 'I don't know where he found this', as if it were some kind of impossibility that anybody but him could have ever visited archives.

Since various members of the team had been to a number of the archives directly, we left the distinction unclear, after noting that we'd used both USHMM and the original archives in the introduction. Today some of the collections in question are open access either via Ukrainian archives or via USHMM having made some open access. The same is true of many other archives - the Bundesarchiv, NARA and others.

Highlighting what is open access is certainly a much more important issue in 2025 than it was in 2011, but this could also be said about Mattogno's sourcing in his books since that date. In some cases he's clearly using open access archives, in others he clearly had visited them in earlier years, but now they're digitised, in others the records are still offline. Mattogno doesn't know how to format his bibliographies by history standards nor does he present a proper introduction which is where one specifies the sources and locations, as we did. But transparency and also doing readers a favour demands that now, with so much digitised yet some key parts still not open access, one should be much clearer than he is, or we were, on where everything can be found.

The ensuing caterwauling was so unreadable that we did not particularly think much of it, as the nitpicking and whining became a way to dodge dealing with the sources. We'd have preferred MGK to have focused on the arguments, but their responses on those were just as unimpressive.

One of the co-authors of MGK's 'trilogy' disappeared just after they put together the response, another retired from active revisionism before the end of the 2010s and passed away last year, leaving Mattogno the only one left standing. Which is of course why I keep noting the dearth of 'serious' revisionists.The revisionist trio disintegrated and the HC group also lost interest once that became apparent.


I would now be keener to underscore the full range of revisionist opinions on xyz point. Some will be repeated from M&G, some will be potentially embarrassing (Krege, anyone?) or never have been corrected by subsequent revisionists. Where that has happened, e.g. telling Butz he was wrong on the Hungarian Jews, it's easy enough to acknowledge. Forgery claims versus 'reinterpretations' would be a recurring theme. Maybe the remaining high priests would have to distance themselves more clearly from older waffle, but those books still hang around like a bad smell.

There are also social media/forum claims which aren't repeated that often in the proper revisionist literature. A good example for AR is the repeated claim that the camps were located on a frontier because of the rail gauge changing thereafter, which is utterly false as all the rail lines were regauged in 1941 well before any of the AR camps became operational.

[curioussoul]

On the taxpayer time, no less. Thank you for final calling this out. I wonder if his students know he literally plagiarized hundreds of archival and other sources and lied about having personally accessed them in order to bolster his own credibility when arguing with revisionists. I won't ask about the faculty staff because they obviously have no standards whatsoever.

2) Not so. I alluded to this in the introduction, but I received around 100,000 pages of documentation from multiple archives and also multiple war crimes investigations/trials, over a year before the white paper appeared, which was hugely relevant for Aktion Reinhardt. This included a wealth of material from the FSB archives Trawniki files which I could not use due to the copying agreement with the institution receiving the files. Some were in the public domain via US denaturalisation court cases, most were not. The other archives included Ludwigsburg, GARF, various Ukrainian and Polish regional and national archives, and many more. There were LOTS of Berlin Document Center personnel files in the collection, as well as numerous Trawniki personnel files from a variety of archives.

That's comical. The plagiarizations were so egregious that, in many cases, you had literally copied minor spelling or translation errors directly from revisionist works, not spotting the mistakes and pretending you'd seen the actual sources. MGK were ultimately forced to add an appendix to their book calling out the innumerable plagiarizations that didn't fit in the main volumes. I realize this probably touches a nerve, as it undermines your credibility as a supposedly serious historian, but you've had all of 10 years to think up a response. I can only implore the lurkers and readers of the forum to look it up for themselves, because your excuses barely scrape the surface of the shameless and blatant plagiarizations you were guilty of. All of this is ironic, given the fact that you baselessly accused MGK of plagiarizing their sources!

A good example for AR is the repeated claim that the camps were located on a frontier because of the rail gauge changing thereafter, which is utterly false as all the rail lines were regauged in 1941 well before any of the AR camps became operational.

All of the rail lines? I'd like you to think hard and good on that before you continue on that tangent.

[Callafangers]

Of course it does, and this is also tied in rather directly to archives being accessible, along with when a critical mass of studies of one aspect interacting with another emerge.

But the archives have not been accessible. It seems disingenuous to suggest otherwise -- you're grasping for a technicality that doesn't even apply in many cases. Yes, revisionists can physically arrive at most of the archives and disguise their intentions while doing so, but then only if they have a history degree (or undergrad study) in many cases, and regardless while risking exposure and, hence, social and professional consequences.

The comparator examples of Stalinist violence and Soviet war losses were substantially inaccessible before circa 1990; only in the 1990s did information and access to previously closed archives become available. The outline of the phenomena were knowable, accuracy was impossible.

And here already is the kind of phrasing I expect to find throughout the rest of your response; a soapbox declaration with the everlasting assumption that the development of the Holohoax was purely a matter of access and awareness -- never of fabrication and narrative-seeding, harvesting.

You simply ignore and omit any and all of the history and historiography which is suspect, hand-waving massive conflicts of interest in the unique and extraordinary post-war power dynamics as trivial or insufficient for any major impact on the record as it now stands.

It's much like a circus performance, lots of 'balancing' required. You must get very tired.

The end of the Cold War and accompanying further declassifications outside the former East Bloc meant that numbers and nuances for the Holocaust, especially for Eastern Europe, could be checked properly and estimates refined. It's therefore not a surprise that after 1990, numbers for western Europe as well as Czechoslovakia hardly budged, since they could be researched fairly well from an early stage, whereas numbers involving Eastern Europe were revised and refined, even if there were many prescient estimates (such as Reitlinger and Hilberg rejecting the Auschwitz 4M for 1 million or less).

Ah yes, good ol' "refinement".

The post-1990 "adjustments" were not a noble quest for precision; they’re damage control after decades of wild exaggeration -- soap and lampshades, 4 million at Auschwitz, 'German barbarians' smashing babies, etc. -- became untenable under scrutiny. You admit numbers for Eastern Europe shifted, but you dodge why: Soviet-controlled data was a black box of propaganda, and Western historians parroted it without question until the Iron Curtain fell. Reitlinger and Hilberg lowballing Auschwitz early on doesn’t absolve the field; it highlights how even skeptics were outliers in a narrative-driven echo chamber. If anything, these revisions prove the fragility of your “unshakable” story.

The revisions were refinements in breaking down numbers that were available already - thus Hilberg's numbers in 1961 were not that far off the mark, despite being based on significantly less sources than were available by the 21st Century. The clarifications of camps turned out to be also quite close to his estimates.

Calling them “refinements” is polishing a [comically large] turd. Hilberg’s 1961 figures being “not far off” is a retroactive pat on the back -- convenient when the goalposts have shifted so much. He worked with scraps because the Allies and Soviets sat on archives or spun them into propaganda gold.

The "less sources" excuse cuts both ways: it shows how much was hidden or manipulated, not how close he was to some imaginary truth. And camp “clarifications”? You mean backpedaling on inflated death tolls once the physical evidence (or lack thereof) couldn’t be ignored.

Stop pretending this is academic rigor; it's a salvage job.

In the case of Hungarian Jewish fates, itineraries and losses, one problem was the relatively slow emergence of systematic 'KZ studies'. Monographs on the individual camps and camp complexes in the west were slow to appear: by 1980 there were reasonably decent studies of Belsen (1962), Dachau (1975) and Mauthausen (circa 1978). The ITS Arolsen was sitting on a wealth of documentation but closed for researchers on both sides of the Iron Curtain by the late 1970s/early 1980s. It had exchanged documentation with KZ museums and research centres before this, as is visible in the expanded references to Danuta Czech's Kalendarium for Auschwitz between the 1960s version and the 1989 version.

Your timeline just underscores the gatekeeping. “Slow emergence” of KZ studies isn’t some accident; it’s a symptom of deliberate suppression and selective release. You assume ITS Arolsen being closed off until the late ‘70s/early ‘80s is necessarily some "bureaucratic hiccup". One can just as well see it as a chokehold on primary data while the narrative solidified. That Czech’s Kalendarium expanded only by 1989 shows how long it took to even peek behind the curtain, and even then, revisions came after revisionists like Mattogno started poking holes (culminated in The Real Auschwitz Chronicle, which shows just how much of the day-to-day operations Czech omitted, and which cumulatively tell a much different, more mundane story than Czech and others have portrayed). Hungarian Jewish itineraries are a mess because the victors have had no interest in tracking survivors who don't fit the genocide script. You’re spinning obstruction as mere "delay".

Just curious: when you investigate specific documentary chains-of-custody, Nick, just how much weight do you assign to circumstances where the archival directors/staff have been Jews, communists, or other overtly anti-German actors? Better yet, please clarify your process to a comprehensive and critical review of 'Holocaust' chains-of-custody in general.

KZs on the eastern side of the Iron Curtain attracted attention from East German and Polish researchers, and indeed some Polish historians wrote on Dachau as well as Gusen in the west. But the East Germans were more interested in emphasising antifascist resistance of especially communists, the Poles were writing in Polish for the most part.

And here’s the rub: East German and Polish “research” was propaganda with footnotes. East Germans pushing the antifascist angle weren’t simply documenting history; they were crafting a usable myth for the regime. Poles writing in Polish for a domestic audience were under Soviet oversight -- hardly a recipe for unvarnished truth. Their focus on Dachau or Gusen was cherry-picked to fit broader anti-Nazi tropes, not to uncover inconvenient details like potential resettlement traces. You gloss over how these agendas shaped the record, as if state-driven bias is just a minor quirk. Laughable.

Reviewing earlier histories of the Holocaust, there is a relative neglect of the final phase in 1944-45 beyond a brief outline. Reitlinger and Hilberg published at a time when there were as good as no KZ histories (for the camps in Germany and Austria). One reason might be that the Nuremberg documents skewed to the higher end of the WVHA, and the underlying source base, the US-captured German records, didn't include the camp-specific records. Only some of those were in the US, others had gravitated to ITS Arolsen or remained behind in Europe.

“Neglect” of 1944-45 isn’t happenstance; it’s strategic. That final phase, with mass evacuations and chaos, risks exposing discrepancies -- like survivors where none should be under your extermination model. Reitlinger and Hilberg had no KZ histories because the Allies prioritized high-level Nuremberg show trials over granular camp data that might contradict the big picture. US-captured records missing camp specifics isn’t 'bad luck'; it’s a curated archive designed to steer focus. ITS Arolsen hoarding docs or leaving them scattered in Europe ensured no one could connect the dots too soon. You frame this as innocent fragmentation -- I see control.

Most typical expositions of the Holocaust in Hungary (I checked as examples the Eichmann trial judgement, Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem and Nora Levin's 1968 book The Holocaust) rapidly become entranced with the negotiations, stop order, rescue efforts and Budapest. Having deported over 400,000 Jews to Auschwitz, they did not stop to consider what happened next. This might be seen as an 'Eichmann bias' reinforcing the view from the German Foreign Office (since the key documents used earlier were from Foreign Office files).

Is the “entrancement” with negotiations and Budapest mere scholarly oversight? Or, is it narrative tunnel vision? Focusing on Eichmann and high-drama rescue tales distracts from the pesky question of where those 400,000+ Hungarian Jews actually ended up if not all gassed. Ignoring “what happened next” is convenient when the answer might not be crematoria but labor camps or eastward movement. Your ‘Eichmann bias’ excuse is a cop-out -- Foreign Office docs were cherry-picked to paint a top-down extermination plot while sidestepping messy ground-level evidence. It’s not a bias; it’s a script.

Over the 1980s, 1990s and into the 21st Century, German and Austrian researchers substantially developed KZ studies, reformed the archives of museums especially if taken over from the DDR, and published more monographs. The bigger books for Neuengamme, as an example, appeared in 1986, 1991 and then an exhaustive study of the sub-camp system in 2009. This followed the German encyclopedia of the KZs which appeared largely between 2006 and 2009. USHMM's Encyclopedia volume on the WVHA camps also appeared in 2009. Updated studies of Majdanek, Stutthof and Gross-Rosen didn't appear until the 1990s.

This late bloom of KZ studies isn’t some 'triumph' in academia -- it’s a delayed reaction once revisionists forced the issue. The ‘80s and ‘90s surge came when Cold War barriers dropped, sure, but also when Mattogno et al exposed glaring holes. Reforming DDR archives and pumping out monographs decades later smells of sanitizing the record (more turd-polishing), not clarifying it. Encyclopedias in 2006-2009? That’s generations after the war -- hardly a rush for truth. Majdanek and Stutthof updates in the ‘90s often slashed death tolls under pressure (see Fred Ziffel's work on Majdanek, here: https://www.codohforum.com/viewtopic.php?t=120). You’re framing a forced correction as organic progress. We see why.

The situation with Auschwitz was not significantly different. The museum published a thicker book in the mid-1980s, in the 1960s and 1970s most of its publications were in the journal or on partial aspects. Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death Camp appeared as a collaborative collection in 1994, after Pressac and Piper's revision of the death toll, but with Hilberg and Braham repeating claims that would be regarded within a few years as firmly wrong. The museum's own five volume Auschwitz 1940-1945 appeared in Polish and German editions thereafter, and in English in 2000.

Auschwitz "not significantly different"? That’s a riot. The museum’s glacial output -- journals and "partial aspects" until the ‘80s -- mirrors the broader stall tactic. Thicker books only came when revisionist heat made the 4 million lie unsustainable. Pressac and Piper’s toll revision was a retreat after decades of fiction. Hilberg and Braham still peddling errors in '94 shows how entrenched bad data was, even among your heavyweights. The 2000 English volumes are a polished PR job, not revelation. Desperation /= diligence.

Laszlo Varga in the chapter on Hungary in Dimension des Völkermords in 1991 arrived at figures for total deportations (not just to Auschwitz) and survivors therefore deaths - half a million deported, 380,000 deaths, without breaking this down for the 400+K Auschwitz number and how many therefore had been selected for work or survived. Tamas Stark published a study in the 1990s in Hungarian, translated to English in 2000, which arrived at similar results from purely demographic (pre-deportation, post-war) considerations, again without focusing on the specific Auschwitz calculation.

Once again we arrive at, "deportations minus survivors equals deaths". What an equation! Just imagine if detective-work were that easy. Across-the-board, these studies prop up a preset death tally rather than question it. This isn't scholarship.

Gerlach and Aly in their 2002 book Das letzte Kapitel included a chapter entitled 'two hundred thousand odysseys', referring to the 110,000 selected for work at Auschwitz and the up to 90,000 taken to Germany and Austria directly. This pulled together what was obvious from the 1980s-1990s KZ studies, fresh sources and also masses of 1945 affidavits which enabled them to follow the deportees through their itineraries and odysseys putting individual experiences to statistics derived from transport lists, camp records and the KZ studies presenting them.

Gerlach and Aly’s 2002 "odysseys" chapter is a late attempt to reconcile survivor numbers with the gassing myth -- conveniently after revisionists raised hell. Pulling from '80s-'90s studies and 1945 affidavits isn’t groundbreaking; it’s scrambling to explain why so many Hungarian Jews popped up alive across Europe.

"B-b-but we're still missing lots of them!" Yes, but we also know they weren't all being 'gassed'; not by a long shot, and that works against you.

The new sources included the Glaser list identifying how many male deportees arriving at Birkenau were given KZ clothing, which showed 55,000 Hungarian Jewish men so clothed, and provided a contrasting set of data to the Auschwitz registrations from the 'Depot' (which had been known from 1944 to be later than the usual tattooing immediately after arrival).

The Glaser list showing 55,000 Hungarian men clothed at Birkenau is a crumb of reality that undercuts your mass-gassing fantasy. If they’re getting KZ gear, they’re not all ash -- yet this "new source" surfaces late, buried until it couldn’t be ignored. The Depot delay on tattooing being "known since 1944" just proves how much was hidden from scrutiny. Why no attention then? Because it muddies the extermination story. You wave this as proof of thoroughness but it looks more like forced/motivated admission after decades of suppression.

This was just one of many revisions and refinements that the mainstream put forward in the 1990s and 2000s. Nearly all of the revisions that are complained about and argued over here, from Piper rejecting the 4M Auschwitz death toll for just over 1 million, the Hoefle telegram in 2002, Kranz's revisions to Majdanek death toll in the mid-2000s, happened in this twenty year period. So did others: this was when post-Soviet historians in Russia, Belarus and Ukraine revised totals for the now independent republics, and when post-Soviet demographers revisited the overall total based on newly available sources and data.

These '90s-2000s "refinements" aren’t victories; they’re concessions under fire from revisionists and reality. Piper slashing Auschwitz to 1 million, Hoefle telegram surfacing, Kranz gutting Majdanek tolls -- these aren’t proactive discoveries; they’re retreats from indefensible lies. Post-Soviet revisions in Russia and elsewhere just show how long propaganda poisoned the well. You paint this as steady progress but its more like a slow unraveling when the old numbers couldn’t hold.

But also for other non-Holocaust death tolls: the extent of the UPA ethnic cleansing of Poles in Volhynia and Galicia was mostly argued out in this period, the Red Army losses were given official figures in the mid-1990s (and then disputed), GULag deaths and executions in the Great Terror were known only from the early 1990s, various revisions and reassessments of war losses and their breakdowns (who killed whom) for Yugoslavia happened as well in the 1990s and 2000s. There was also renewed scrutiny of the death toll in the Heimatvertreibungen, while Ruediger Overmans revisited German military casualties with a major study using very large samples of the card index material in 2000. Richard Overy reviewed contemporary exaggerations of deaths in bombing raids in Europe during WWII and synthesised now available reports and statistics in The Bombing War in 2013. A number were lowered as a result.

Dragging in Volhynia, Red Army losses, GULag, Yugoslavia, and bombing raid tolls is a distraction. Post-Cold War access revised many tallies -- often downward (due to propaganda inflation) but equating these to Holocaust revisions is a false parallel. The Holocaust narrative isn't just a number game; it's a sacred cow with legal, social, and political shields unlike any other topic. Lowering non-Holocaust tolls didn’t threaten a global victimhood industry or risk jail time for researchers. Your examples show data can correct itself when free; Holocaust "adjustments" fight tooth and nail against scrutiny. Apples to oranges.

More to come.

[bombsaway]

But the archives have not been accessible. It seems disingenuous to suggest otherwise -- you're grasping for a technicality that doesn't even apply in many cases. Yes, revisionists can physically arrive at most of the archives and disguise their intentions while doing so, but then only if they have a history degree (or undergrad study) in many cases, and regardless while risking exposure and, hence, social and professional consequences.

Are you implying the archives likely contain material that orthodoxy is suppressing?

[Callafangers]

But the archives have not been accessible. It seems disingenuous to suggest otherwise -- you're grasping for a technicality that doesn't even apply in many cases. Yes, revisionists can physically arrive at most of the archives and disguise their intentions while doing so, but then only if they have a history degree (or undergrad study) in many cases, and regardless while risking exposure and, hence, social and professional consequences.

Are you implying the archives likely contain material that orthodoxy is suppressing?

I think it is more likely that important records have been stolen entirely, or perhaps even modified/manipulated in certain cases (less is more) and that the orthodoxy seeks to limit any potential oversights on their part (i.e. documents which could still be exonerating for Germany or incriminating for its opponents) from becoming too problematic, should revisionists be given free reign.

Any productive conversation on the question of archival records needs to begin with serious discussion on the integrity and track record of those who have controlled them:

• How many important records could those controlling the archives have omitted (hidden/destroyed) or modified?
• How many such important records did they likely want to omit or modify?
• Do these entities have a significant history or pattern of falsifying records for their gain?

It boggles the mind how anyone could seriously present documentation without asking where it has been, who has held it, why they had it, what they could have done to it, and what else they could be hiding.

The "devil is in the details" and easily obscured once you give me total autonomy/autocracy over the historical record.

[bombsaway]

But the archives have not been accessible. It seems disingenuous to suggest otherwise -- you're grasping for a technicality that doesn't even apply in many cases. Yes, revisionists can physically arrive at most of the archives and disguise their intentions while doing so, but then only if they have a history degree (or undergrad study) in many cases, and regardless while risking exposure and, hence, social and professional consequences.

Are you implying the archives likely contain material that orthodoxy is suppressing?

I think it is more likely that important records have been stolen entirely, or perhaps even modified/manipulated in certain cases (less is more) and that the orthodoxy seeks to limit any potential oversights on their part (i.e. documents which could still be exonerating for Germany or incriminating for its opponents) from becoming too problematic, should revisionists be given free reign.

Any productive conversation on the question of archival records needs to begin with serious discussion on the integrity and track record of those who have controlled them:

• How many important records could those controlling the archives have omitted (hidden/destroyed) or modified?
• How many such important records did they likely want to omit or modify?
• Do these entities have a significant history or pattern of falsifying records for their gain?

It boggles the mind how anyone could seriously present documentation without asking where it has been, who has held it, why they had it, what they could have done to it, and what else they could be hiding.

The "devil is in the details" and easily obscured once you give me total autonomy/autocracy over the historical record.

I'm not sure what the relevance of the archives being "restricted" is in this case anyway. Do you have evidence of documents being scrubbed manipulated or is this speculative? It seems the main rationale here would be that the narrative MUST be false / resettlement MUST have happened (for other reasons, eg the impossibility of gassings), therefore there MUST have been a cover up. No evidence necessary because it logically follows.

[Callafangers]

I'm not sure what the relevance of the archives being "restricted" is in this case anyway. Do you have evidence of documents being scrubbed manipulated or is this speculative? It seems the main rationale here would be that the narrative MUST be false / resettlement MUST have happened (for other reasons, eg the impossibility of gassings), therefore there MUST have been a cover up. No evidence necessary because it logically follows.

How many documents do you think in total the Soviet Union could have simply removed from their archives over the course of decades?

One? Ten?

One-hundred? Thousands?

Tens of thousands?

All of the above are entirely feasible, and same goes with Israel, Poland, and other archival facilities/locations where communists, Jews, etc. acted in a leadership (or even unmonitored staff or entry-level) capacity. Anyone with a will to 'denazify' the public mind is evidently suspect -- if patterns of behavior among common ideological or political groups and currents matter at all, they matter here.

Your last sentence attempts again to switch the burden of proof. You claim that your 'Holocaust' has been proven. I'm merely the messenger, pointing out that it has not.

[bombsaway]

I'm not sure what the relevance of the archives being "restricted" is in this case anyway. Do you have evidence of documents being scrubbed manipulated or is this speculative? It seems the main rationale here would be that the narrative MUST be false / resettlement MUST have happened (for other reasons, eg the impossibility of gassings), therefore there MUST have been a cover up. No evidence necessary because it logically follows.

How many documents do you think in total the Soviet Union could have simply removed from their archives over the course of decades?

One? Ten?

One-hundred? Thousands?

Tens of thousands?

All of the above are entirely feasible, and same goes with Israel, Poland, and other archival facilities/locations where communists, Jews, etc. acted in a leadership (or even unmonitored staff or entry-level) capacity. Anyone with a will to 'denazify' the public mind is evidently suspect -- if patterns of behavior among common ideological or political groups and currents matter at all, they matter here.

Your last sentence attempts again to switch the burden of proof. You claim that your 'Holocaust' has been proven. I'm merely the messenger, pointing out that it has not.

Just to be clear, I'm trying to assess whether you believe there is any evidence for this mass scrubbing of documents.

I've pointed out before that the USSR failed to cover up its own crimes, ones that would leave a much smaller paper trail, like Katyn.

[Callafangers]

Just to be clear, I'm trying to assess whether you believe there is any evidence for this mass scrubbing of documents.

I've pointed out before that the USSR failed to cover up its own crimes, ones that would leave a much smaller paper trail, like Katyn.

Katyn was distinct given that an internationally-overseen excavation and investigation (German-led) had already taken place, and that the deaths were abundantly confirmed at the time and place as alleged, per this excavation/investigation and other findings which simply were not possible to conceal (this was pre-Iron Curtain).

What Katyn showed is that the Soviets were lying about German atrocities. With this event, the maliciously dishonest, conspiratorial nature of the Soviet Union regarding their framing and reporting of alleged German atrocities was confirmed beyond any doubt whatever. The fraudulent 'Katyn report' had one-hundred (100) signatures on it, from actual Soviet people -- all of whom had been forced or conditioned (or were simply self-motivated) to lie, and to sign their names on it. There are your 'witnesses'.

But it wasn't just Katyn. Soviet dishonesty and show trials extended all the way into (and beyond) the postwar East German trials, a spectacle where justice was only ever incidental. Soviet dishonesty became notorious globally, exposed ad nauseum during the Cold War era, despite the Iron Curtain.

The fact that there were some 'leaks' of Soviet atrocities throughout these periods is not evidence that the Soviets were fumbling idiots who could not keep a secret. It's suggestive that their secrets, their schemes, were so numerous and extensive that some inevitably fell through, despite their best efforts to prevent such exposure.

All of the evidence favors this interpretation. No informed, reasonable person would claim the Soviets were not good at keeping secrets. There are many which the world will never know, according to even top historians on the matter (see 1:12:00):

[bombsaway]

Just to be clear, I'm trying to assess whether you believe there is any evidence for this mass scrubbing of documents.

I've pointed out before that the USSR failed to cover up its own crimes, ones that would leave a much smaller paper trail, like Katyn.

Katyn was distinct given that an internationally-overseen excavation and investigation (German-led) had already taken place, and that the deaths were abundantly confirmed at the time and place as alleged, per this excavation/investigation and other findings which simply were not possible to conceal (this was pre-Iron Curtain).

What Katyn showed is that the Soviets were lying about German atrocities. With this event, the maliciously dishonest, conspiratorial nature of the Soviet Union regarding their framing and reporting of alleged German atrocities was confirmed beyond any doubt whatever. The fraudulent 'Katyn report' had one-hundred (100) signatures on it, from actual Soviet people -- all of whom had been forced or conditioned (or were simply self-motivated) to lie, and to sign their names on it. There are your 'witnesses'.

But it wasn't just Katyn. Soviet dishonesty and show trials extended all the way into (and beyond) the postwar East German trials, a spectacle where justice was only ever incidental. Soviet dishonesty became notorious globally, exposed ad nauseum during the Cold War era, despite the Iron Curtain.

The fact that there were some 'leaks' of Soviet atrocities throughout these periods is not evidence that the Soviets were fumbling idiots who could not keep a secret. It's suggestive that their secrets, their schemes, were so numerous and extensive that some inevitably fell through, despite their best efforts to prevent such exposure.

All of the evidence favors this interpretation. No informed, reasonable person would claim the Soviets were not good at keeping secrets. There are many which the world will never know, according to even top historians on the matter (see 1:12:00):

I am aware that you can rationalize why they didn't destroy evidence of their many crimes, which go far beyond Katyn, but somehow effected a perfect scrubbing of resettlement documents - I would disagree here but it's not the main point.

I think it's been demonstrated in this thread that the conspiracy would have had to be vast, encompassing most of the academic/archival establishment, the publishing world. I'm sure you can rationalize why those numbers are actually tiny, maybe a few hundred conspirators would be able to tightly control everything (even this strains credulity for me, that there would be no leaks even with such a small amount of people in the know)

What you can't avoid is that you are turning possibility into certainty, because you have no evidence. You believe the Holocaust didn't happen, therefore the conspiracy is indicated.

[Nazgul]

What you can't avoid is that you are turning possibility into certainty, because you have no evidence. You believe the Holocaust didn't happen, therefore the conspiracy is indicated.

The existence of 44 000 camps is known. 3000 of those camps were for Jews. For you the following is justified.

[bombsaway]

What you can't avoid is that you are turning possibility into certainty, because you have no evidence. You believe the Holocaust didn't happen, therefore the conspiracy is indicated.

The existence of 44 000 camps is known. 3000 of those camps were for Jews. For you the following is justified.

I trust the German census documents which state that the Jews in question weren't in Poland anymore, so I can't follow you down this road. No evidence of any resettlement camps (where families, children, may have been housed), in Poland or outside of it either.