Resettlement Hypothesis Revisited: Denial's Intellectual Bankruptcy

Given that deniers have not contested the evidence that millions of Jews were transported to Auschwitz, Majdanek and the Reinhardt camps (although Weckert has tried this gambit for Chelmno), their only explanation for the Jews' fate must be that they were transported further east. We have already pointed out the deceptions to which Mattogno and Graf have had to resort in order to substantiate that case. What are the other fatal flaws in the hypothesis? They fall into five categories.

Read more!

Firstly, it should be obvious that if there is no positive evidence for the hypothesis, it is simply a faith position. Deniers cling to the maxim that 'absence of evidence is not evidence of absence'. I have already shown here why that cannot apply to resettlement:

Revisionists have had over sixty years in which to find records of transports taking Jews from the camps to the USSR, or records of resettlement, or even eyewitnesses of such resettlement, but have been unable to uncover any such evidence. They have been unable to explain why no defendants at postwar trials, including those such as Eichmann who had direct responsibility for 'evacuation' transports, ever used the 'transit camp' gambit in their defence, despite the fact that this would surely have been the most obvious defence available, had it been true. Moreover, they ignore the fact that the Soviets signed repatriation agreements with Poland in September 1944 and July 1945 but the total number of Polish Jews who returned under those agreements was only 230,700 (source: Yosef's Litvak's essay in Polonsky and Davies, Jews in Eastern Poland and the U.S.S.R., 1939-46, p.235).

Consequently, the 'absence of evidence' gambit is a fallacy because there are powerful reasons why evidence of resettlement should be present.

Secondly, we have evidence of resistance by the SS to Jewish resettlement. I gave a detailed example of such a document, which Mattogno and Graf blatantly distorted, here. It is patently absurd to pretend that senior SS officials, who were paranoid about Jewish partisans and 'diseases spread by Jews', would permit mass resettlement into their regions.

Thirdly, civilian authorities had expressed concern during 1941 that Jews in Polish ghettoes could no longer be fed. Such problems would clearly have been even greater in war-torn USSR, so it is no surprise that the Nazis had starvation plans for Jews and other groups in the USSR. There is also documentary evidence that forced labour was intended to result in the death of the Jews involved. It is thus bizarre to suggest that a civilian administration geared to making the USSR 'judenfrei' would consent to the influx of huge numbers of Jews from the west.

Fourthly, as I showed here, ethnic Germans in the USSR were traced successfully in the decades following 1945, presumably in part because they maintained contact with their relatives in the west. It therefore follows that contact between Jews sent east from Poland and their relatives back in the west would almost certainly have been established had such Jews not been killed by the Nazis.

Finally, there is documentation showing that transport logistics to the East were a nightmare. For example, Pohl reported that:

The transportation by rail proved to be especially difficult

Through the continually recurring transportation stoppages, the dispatch was held up with the resulting [sic] in temporary accumulations in the individual camps.

The transportation hold-up to the Ukraine has been especially noticeable since December 1942, and prevented the delivery of old clothing intended for the racial Germans there....

In conclusion, therefore, deniers have not only provided no evidence of resettlement where such evidence would certainly exist; they have also not even begun to address the huge obstacles to such resettlement. Such is the bankruptcy of denial.