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[–]weavilsatemyface 3 insightful - 1 fun3 insightful - 0 fun4 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Demographic changes are proof of death?

If, at the start of the war, there were (let's say) 80 thousand Swiss in Greece, and during the war 20 thousand of them emigrate to other countries, and then after the war it is found that there are only 10 thousand Swiss remaining, what happened to the other 50 thousand of them? The only logical conclusion is that the Swiss are the secret rulers of the world and deserved to be murdered, but they weren't actually murdered, they just disappeared off the trains into thin air half way to the death camps that actually weren't murder camps even though the people who made them called them murder camps and everything. Right?

Millions of Jews emigrated Europe shortly after the end of the war into the US and Palestine/Israel.

Exactly. We know how many Jews were in Europe before the war, because they were counted by their home countries. It was the 20th century, not 500 BCE, all European countries had bureaucracies to count their population, most countries in Europe demanded that people were registered at birth and had identity papers. After the war, we know how many survivors were left because they were counted again, especially those who migrated. What happened to the rest? Did they just disappear into smoke by spontaneous human combustion?

Yes, in the chaos of the war, some people would fall through the cracks and gain a stolen or fake identity, or just sneak out of the country. How many? A few hundred, maybe a few thousands? Even fifty thousand would be a mere 1% or so, and would make no difference to the big picture.

a walking tribe of nothingness with no home country

Jews in Europe were citizens of France, Germany, Austria, Greece, Poland, Russia etc. They were counted in censuses. They owned houses and had jobs or worked the land as permanent farm workers. They had homes and businesses which were stolen from them. They weren't migrant transient peoples like the Gypsies who never stayed in one place for long. That is why there were only a few Gypsies in Europe, and it is much, much harder to work out how many were killed. But the Jews were settled citizens who paid taxes and had identity papers.

As an ethnic group, they had no home country, like many other ethnic groups who have been brutalised by their more powerful neighbours. Ask the Kurds where their home country is. As a religion, they have no need for a home country: you can be a Jewish German just as you can be a Catholic German or a Protestant German or a Buddhist German or an atheist German.

Millions of Jews(and other people) were sent to transit camps during the war?

Transit camps to where? Uranus? That must be it: the Germans loaded them into giant rocket ships, and sent them to the Moon, where now there are tens of millions of people, descendants of the Slavs and Jews and Jehovahs Witnesses who weren't actually killed at all. What other possible explanation could there be, I mean just because the Nazi leadership talked about exterminating the Jews and Slavs, just because eye-witnesses saw them, and some camp guards confessed, and corpses found, and mobile killing vans captured, doesn't mean the Nazis actually did what they said they did.

Its all a big misunderstanding, the Nazis put the Jews on a train and sent them to Japan, where they happily converted to Buddhism and integrated with the Japanese.

Where are the 10 Million displaced Germans from Eastern Europe, were they all murdered

It was more like 12 million, maybe as many as 15 million. No, they weren't all murdered. We know where they ended up. There were three waves:

  • The organised evacuation of Germans by the Nazi government.
  • The disorganised fleeing of ethnic Germans following the Wehrmacht's defeat.
  • And the organised expulsion of Germans from Hungary, Poland and Czechoslovakia, agreed to by the Allies in the Potsdam Agreement.

At least half a million, maybe as many as two million, died during the flight and expulsion, from hunger, disease, and, yes, some of them murdered. The survivors ended up in Germany.

It is ironic that you don't believe demographic data when it comes to the Holocaust but you do believe it when it comes to the expulsion of the Germans. Hypocrisy is a terrible thing.

Höss testified for 2.5 Million during his administration during the Nuremberg Trials

He also testified that he wasn't sure how many people were killed, because the records had been destroyed to cover it up, and his figure of 2.5 million was just his best guess.

The problem with Holocaust denialists is that they think evidence is like a chain. If one single link in the chain is broken, no matter how small, the whole thing breaks apart. If somebody says they personally cut the throat of some Jew with a six inch carving knife on a Monday, but it turned out it was actually a five inch filleting knife on a Tuesday, that discrepancy is enough to prove that the Holocaust didn't happen according to the denialists.

But evidence is more like a rope, not a chain. If a thread breaks in a rope, it doesn't matter. Who cares if Höss was unable to remember the exact number of people he murdered? Whether it was 2.5 million or 1 million or just half a million barely matters in the big picture.

The CEO of Nike probably doesn't know how many pairs of running shoes the company made either, and would have to look it up, and if the records had been destroyed he'd have to guess too. I suppose that means that Nike doesn't actually make running shoes. Its all a big lie. Right?

Why don't you believe his confession? I thought SS confessions are very reliable?

No, confessions and eye-witness accounts are the least reliable form of evidence. Physical evidence, like tens of thousands of emaciated, starving survivors, mass graves, burn pits, mountains of ash spread over hundreds of acres of land, aerial photographs, etc are much more reliable. But even less reliable evidence is still evidence. Thousands of -people were eye-witnesses or confessed. Each one individually might be not be perfectly reliable, but some are more unreliable than others, and there is collaborating physical evidence. In total, historians can work out what's impossible, what's unlikely, what's plausible, and what's likely. That's what they do.

A crime was committed. The accused had means, motive and opportunity, and left a mountain of evidence behind despite trying to destroy it. There are witnesses, and confessions, and physical evidence. Where the evidence collaborates we can be more certain. Where the evidence contradicts, we can reject it as mistaken, or confused, or simply that in the chaos of real historical events not everything is cut and dried.