Deniers such as Mattogno and Graf tell us that most of the Jews transported to the Reinhardt camps were resettled within the USSR. The principle of Occam's Razor advises that, for this thesis to be plausible, it must require as few assumptions as possible. We have identified six assumptions that are either implicitly or explicitly stated in denial claims concerning 'transit camps', none of which has any evidential basis.
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1. The Soviets destroyed the Nazi records of transports from the Reinhardt camps to the USSR. No evidence is offered that the Soviets would have been able to capture all these records. The assumption overlooks the fact that many Nazi documents were captured by the British and Americans.
2. Witnesses to the transports were frightened into remaining silent by the Soviets. This fails to explain how witnesses to other Soviet actions such as the Katyn massacre did manage to get their testimonies to the west. It also fails to explain why no surviving witnesses who subsequently emigrated to the west or survived the downfall of the Soviet regime have ever come forward.
3. Eichmann never mentioned the transports in his defence because he was tortured. In reality, Eichmann had 15 years in which to reveal details of these transports before he was arrested. He was interviewed by a Dutch journalist, Willem Sassen, in Argentina in 1957 but never mentioned these transports.
4. The Soviets murdered the Jews. Deniers who make this argument never identify the mass grave sites where these dead Jews can be found, yet they hypocritically attack the mass graves evidence of normative historians.
5. The Jews moved to Palestine or the USA. Deniers are unable to cite any demographic data for the USA or Israel that would support this claim. They also ignore the fact that the Soviet Union had strict emigration controls so an emigration of at least 1.2 million Jews would have needed to be authorized and documented.
6. The Soviets forced them to renounce their religion and to take Soviet citizenship, so they didn't appear in the 1959 census. This fails to explain why the Soviets allowed up to 260,000 Polish Jews to repatriate between 1944 and 1960, despite the fact that they had taken Soviet citizenship during the war. None of these repatriated Jews has ever stated that he or she was transported to the USSR from the Reinhardt camps, and deniers have never found any evidence that any of the repatriates was ever in a Reinhardt camp.
Yes, you do make a point using Occam's Razor.
ReplyDeleteIt would certainly make more sense -- and call for less assumptions -- for the Germans to design, build, and maintain an entire infrastructure to transport, feed , house, exterminate, and dispose of the corpses of the Jews.
Add to that the German’s unlimited war-time resources and by golly, “Death Camps” are indeed the only logical assumption. Good call!
Butch
P.S. BTW, can (will?) anyone tell me why Sergey Romanov (living in Moscow) doesn’t speak or write Russian? Come on guys, I’ve asked this question 100 times. Either he has to quit posing as a Russian or fess-up.