Friday, June 10, 2022

Ryan Faulk Is Not a Slave to Your Funhouses

Ryan Faulk is a guy who likes to depict himself, according to his Youtube channel "The Alternative Hypothesis, as "Anti-racist, anti-Nazi, anti-totalitarian." That said, his race-IQ obsession would seem to undermine the first claim. And now, his foray into Holocaust denial would seem to belie the second.

In a video posted to Bitchute on June 7 entitled "Then Where Did the Jews Go?", Faulk dips his toe into these troubled waters. You can find the video if you want; he also posted the text transcript, which you can find here.

You'll notice, on page 7 of the transccript, that Ryan's analysis begins with the American Jewish Yearbook figures. He also relies fairly heavenly on Walter Sanning's Dissolution of European Jewry. We've addressed both texts quite extensively at this website: here's a representative sample. In short, Faulk's video is just old sardines in a new tin. So why bother with it?

I decided to respond to some of Faulk's arguments in a comment on his Bitchute channel. Rather than going point by point, I decided to address the figures on page 25 of his transcript (roughly 40 minutes into the video). Faulk's assertion here was simple -- six million Jews could have not been murdered because there were slightly fewer than three million Jews within reach of the Nazis or their allies in August 1940.

The question I posed in response was simple: Why should we trust his figures when the Nazis' own population figures, presented at Wannsee in January 1942, indicate quite different numbers? Faulk claims there were only 720,402 Jews in Poland (here, he is referring is referring only to those areas of Poland under German control in August 1940); however, the Wannsee Protocol puts that number (Generalgouvernement + Ostgebiete) at 2.684 million. The number for Hungary that Faulk presents (431,731) is more than 300,000 less than the Wannsee figure (742,800). A quick Ctrl-F search will tell you Faulk doesn't mention the Wannsee data at all in his presentation.

Then, I went after his claims about the movements of Jewish populations within Poland between September 1939 and June 1941. Faulk makes the following claim, being charitable (he claims) in presenting the lowest possible estimates: "This means we assume 750,000 Polish Jews fled from Nazi Poland to Soviet Poland, and 100% of them survived that trip, and 100% of them wanted to return to Nazi Poland, and were thus sent off to Siberia."

It so happens that I wrote a term paper on this topic not that long ago, so I was pretty sure he was way off here. As I noted in my Bitchute comment, the USHMM put the number of Jews fleeing into the Soviet zone of occupation following the Nazi invasion at 300,000. Moreover, of these Jewish refugees, not only did 100% of them not desire return to Nazi-occupied Poland (for what should be obvious reasons), but also not all of the Jewish refugees in the Soviet zone undergo deportation. Grzegorz Hryciuk's study of the topic found two major deportations of Jewish refugees: the first, which was forced impressment to Ukraine to work in mines, deported 60,000 people, but Ukrainians and Poles were both deported along with Jews. Even if we assume that all of the deportees between October 1939 and August 1940 were Jews, that's still far smaller than Faulk's number of 750,000. Further, Hryciuk's study identifies only one further deportation of Jewish refugees from the Soviet zone -- this one in June 1940 -- subjected more than 75,000 Jews to either deportation or arrest. Even if we add these two figures together, it only yields a total of 135,000 Jews, compared to Faulk's 750,000.

Why, I asked, should we consider Faulk's figures at all reliable?

Not only did Faulk not respond to my topic, but he deleted it and subsequently blocked me from posting further on his channel. When I asked him on Gab (his Twitter account has been suspended) why he had not responded to my comment and blocked me, he responded cryptically, "I'm not a slave to your funhouses."

So much for the confidence of the young new generation of deniers in their assertions.

21 comments:

  1. From the PDF, out of nowhere:
    "Mussolini, whose appearance and mannerisms are similar to Donald Trump, seems to be of remarkably similar personality to Trump. Today, Trump let his daughter marry a Jew. In his day, Mussolini prevented Jews from being shipped to the east – whatever that means. Though perhaps I'm taking mere
    coincidence as evidence of a physiognomic truth."

    What the hell?

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  2. God only knows. The guys seems like a real piece of work.

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  5. When will there be a discussion of the Kinna Report document?

    https://holocaustcontroversies.blogspot.com/2017/07/the-kinna-report-german-document-on.html?lr=1

    The deniers missed an important contradiction in the document, because according to official history cripples, idiots and inferior people were exterminated until the end of the war, especially in "death camps", according to T4 action, while in the document we see that the RSHA prevents T4 against Poles. According to this "document" the Poles were supposed to die a natural death, which contradicts the official history. The official history says that idiot Germans were not allowed to die in peace, but were forced to die, and here the Poles showed mercy. This is especially noteworthy when looking at the extermination of incapacitated TB Poles in other "documents" One such statement alone is ready to put an end to the authenticity of this document

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    1. There's no contradiction at all. Even "Other documents", such as Hagen's letter to Hitler made it clear that the killings of Jews took precedence: i.e. Hagen proposed that the same killing measures against Jews be applied to Poles.

      It was also the Poles themselves who first published the Kinna report in their Auschwitz Trial. Keep in mind that communist Poland participated in the Soviet Censorship of the Jewish Holocaust. I.e. in the Auschwitz Memorial that they controlled, they emphasized the deaths of Poles and generally ignored those of Jews. It's therefore extremely unlikely that they would "forge" the Kinna report to say the opposite of what their policy is.

      We do however have a record of some Poles fabricating a Statement from Himmler, (that Poles were To
      Be exterminated) that could not have been made simply because Himmler was in a different place when the statement was supposed to have been given.

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    2. Could the statement about Polish extermination have been genuine but misattributed to Himmler?

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    3. Possibly. Until the original source document can be identified it's up in the air.

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    4. Sergey blogged on that document in 2019 and showed it was a stray that was being slipped in, and a definite forgery, the dating for the purported speech is completely impossible given we have Himmler's appointments calendar for 1940: https://holocaustcontroversies.blogspot.com/2019/03/correction-corner-8-alleged-himmler.html

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    5. Nathan notes there are other examples; the Wetzel commentary and Hagen to Hitler letters ended up in western hands as did the Gollert thinkpiece on Polish policy which uses similar contrasts (necessary to kill Jews, unthinkable to liquidate Poles) - this one ended up in the YIVO collection of captured documents. There are other examples in the IMT and NMT series re Zamosc where Germans reported Polish fears they were next. Also paralleling this is a Himmler to Kaltenbrunner letter scolding him for excessive deportations from Theresienstadt to Auschwitz, saying he wanted the over-65s among the German Jews to have a more peaceful death, a similar circumspection that is almost as sinister as the formulation in the Kinna report.

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  6. Please do not spam the same comment/question under different posts, further repetitions will be deleted.

    Your question/comment on the Kinna report suggests you've not read the crucial lines properly: "Imbeciles, idiots, cripples and sick people have to be removed from the camp within a short time by liquidation to unburden the camp. But this measure has insofar complications as, according to the order from the RSHA, the Poles have to die of a natural death contrary to the measures applied to the Jews."

    - the first sentence refers to euthanasia within the KZ system, aka Aktion 14 f 13, which was suspended in April 1943.
    - euthanasia outside the KZ system, aka the T4 program of gassing psychiatric patients, had been suspended in August 1941, giving way to 'wild' euthanasia via starvation rations and lethal injections in psychiatric hospitals
    - the second sentence is Kinna, a non-KZ official, summarising how this policy contradicts the general intention to let Poles die a 'natural death', in contrast to the policies towards the Jews. Here Aumeier from KL Auschwitz is effectively equating such policies (towards unfit Jews) with 14 f 13 and the fate of "imbeciles, idiots, cripples and sick people"
    - Kinna is therefore recording the dilemma for Nazi policy and contrasting the fates of Poles and Jews, something done in many other sources in 1942 and later on, e.g. in the letter of Dr Hagen to Hitler around the same time, in which the chief medical officer of the city of Warsaw heard of rumours that Poles captured in the same Zamosc action that Kinna was involved with would be treated like the Jews, 'that is, to kill them': https://holocaustcontroversies.blogspot.com/2019/08/the-hagen-letter-to-deal-with-13-of.html

    - it's true that Himmler rejected a proposal by Gauleiter Greiser of the Warthegau in May 1942 to subject Poles with tuberculosis to 'special treatment' at the hands of the same Sonderkommando responsible for exterminating 100,000 unfit Jews at Chelmno. But the paper trail provides even more direct evidence of exterminatory intent, resulting in a slip-up by Carlo Mattogno in one of his books: https://holocaustcontroversies.blogspot.com/2011/12/mattognos-fatal-concession-killing-of.html

    - in general, discussing the authenticity of documents requires two things, both of which you failed to do here
    a) bearing in mind the wider paper trail, in order to establish the contemporary discourse, and see how this was variously reflected in terms of chains of command, regions, institutions, 'need to know', and so on. The Kinna report fits very well into this wider paper trail as an admission of a policy conundrum, but also echoing many, many other contrasts between the fate of Poles and Jews (eg the Wetzel commentary on the Generalplan Ost from spring 1942 does the same - Poles cannot be liquidated, unlike the Jews).

    If all you have to doubt authenticity is your interpretation of a text, then your argument will likely be unconvincing.

    b) external criticism and considering provenance, which requires checking the files from where a document comes from, and being aware of what else was captured by which state. In this case, the Kinna report was used in several Polish NTN trials, we know the Poles captured various RSHA 'resettlement' agency collections of documents (and more from RSHA headquarters), they also received documents copied from the US Nuremberg successor trial records. But in this case, the document appears to be one of their own finds.

    As there is nothing inconsistent in the text with other documents, there is no reason to doubt authenticity further, but if you wanted to make a big spiel about this one, then unless you actually demonstrated you've seen the files and made a good-faith search of parent institutional records, the forgery gambit will not be convincing, and seems a little pointless when there are dozens of even more explicit documents to deal with.

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    1. Thank you for this response. I suggest that this detail be explained in the Kinna Report, as this detail is particularly important. I found interesting documents about the final solution of the Czech question, when Hitler on the proposal of special treatment of the Czechs who would not be Germanized replied "they should be destroyed", I need your help in this, how do I find digital images of the documents? I cannot find this document in the Bundesarchiv, nor can I find it in other archives. The first link is to a text document that talks about the special treatment of the Czechs: https://www.herder-institut.de/digitale-angebote/dokumente-und-materialien/themenmodule/quelle/1965/details.html

      And Hitler's response to it "Diese Kategorie sei auszumerzen. https://www.herder-institut.de/digitale-angebote/dokumente-und-materialien/themenmodule/quelle/1960/details.html

      Also I would like to know about the detail in Yeager's report, there was a German killed in the report, the husband of a Jewish woman, what can you say about that? Were German men married to Jewish women murdered? What was the reason for killing this German man?

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    2. The document with Hitler's response to the extermination of the Czechs is presented at the Nuremberg Trials and I found it, but here is the proposal for "special treatment" of the Czechs how to find it? Link: https://www.herder-institut.de/digitale-angebote/dokumente-und-materialien/themenmodule/quelle/1965/details.html

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  7. The Herder Institut document from 30 November 1940 was published originally in a document edition in Czechoslovakia in 1960. That suggests it originates from the Czech-captured records of the Reichsprotektorat. It might be easier to first track down secondary literature that cites an archival file reference for the document. Googling 'Tschechen Sonderbehandlung 1940' finds a google books snippet from Isabel Heinemann's Rasse, Blut, deutsche Siedlung, which however cites published editions (Kral). There is a 21st Century biography of Karl Hermann Frank digitised at one or both of Digi20 and ostdok.de, which might have engaged with the Czech-held Reichsprotektorat records and thus cited from the files rather than from Kral. Three of the key collections in the Narodni Archiv - sygn. 109, 110 and JAF 1005 - are actually digitised on the Czech national archives site, see under 'Europe' in the online open access sources page, but the online file browser is a bit of a nightmare to navigate, and until you have an exact file number identifying which collection this was in, I wouldn't recommend blundering around looking for a needle in a haystack.

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  8. Having worked with a digitised but offline copy of JAF 1005 and looked for speciifc documents from Heydrich's time (especially the 10 October 1941 meeting), the Czech document editions are reliable, they were not making up these documents, but seeing the original as a facsimile is always eye-opening and is much more 'conclusive'. The exchanges in 1940 do suggest that small parts of the Czech intelligentsia and seriously 'racially inferior' groups ("Mongoloids") were slated for extermination, as does Hitler's reply. We know however that by 1941, plans to expell larger parts of the Czech population were abandoned, and the Nazis, especially with Heydrich as deputy Reich Protector, backed away from their earlier radicalism.

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  9. Re the Jaeger report's listing of a German husband of a Jewish woman being killed, look up the town or site in question for further details, if any are known. There were other cases of mixed marriages where the non-Jewish partner remained outside the surviving bigger ghettos, at least one, Helene Czapski-Holzman, wrote a diary re Kaunas, she was married to a Jewish man. There was a half-Jewish German refugee also in Kaunas, Edwin Geist, who went into hiding and was murdered in December 1942, his Lithuanian wife Lyda then committed suicide; Edwin's diaries/writings survived and are also published. Elsewhere in the occupied USSR - so policies varied somewhat - half-Jewish children might be spared for a while then murdered in a follow-on wave, with their non-Jewish mothers often dying with them (eg in Simferopol in Crimea, as recorded in the retired Russian dentist Khrisanf Lashkevich's diary). In other places, non-Jews married to Jews were granted rapid divorces, or demanded them, sometimes they went into the often temporary ghettos with their spouses and died alongside them.

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    1. It is about a German who was married to a Jewish woman. On what grounds was he killed? Were Germans married to Jewish women killed?

      1.9.41 Mariampole 1,763 Jews, 1,812 Jewesses, 1,404 Jewish children, 109 mentally ill, 1 German subject (f.), married to a Jew, 1 Russian (f.) 5090

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    2. As I explained, some non-Jewish spouses may have chosen to die with their partners. Read more into Marijampole if you want to find out more, although there's no guarantee that other sources exist which might explain this case. The fact that the German subject was a woman, and that a Russian woman was also executed alongside psychiatric patients, suggests there might have been a political element to this, but also there might have been some misogyny involved. As noted, German women married to male Lithuanian Jews in Kaunas were not executed 'on principle', so this looks like a case-by-case scenario, which shouldn't be a surprise.

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  10. PS it might be easier if you joined Skeptics Society Forum, discussing things in blog comments threads can become a pain (esp for non-embedded links). This is where I hang out more often than not. Unlike the International Skeptics Forum, discussion is not confined to a single thread but there's a whole sub-forum on Holocaust, genocide and mass violence.
    https://www.skepticforum.com/viewforum.php?f=39

    There are some others there who are actively paying attention to the online documents/digitisation, like Reaktori from Greece. There's usually one denier in residence at any one time, serving as a chew toy, so there's also a discussion aimed at 'actual' Holocaust denial.

    If you simply wish to pick researchers' brains for tips and expertise on archives etc, the Axis History Forum is still a good resource, the Holocaust and war crimes plus SS/Police sections being most relevant, the archives section is also good for finding out what is being digitised, rather than asking questions 'help me find this document'.

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  11. What happened to the comments disagreeing with the claims asserted by this post? Is there a reason why they were all seemingly purged?

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  12. Comments on posts older than 90 days require approval, see the comments policy. The general rule is comments won't be approved on older posts, this is because the blog is less active, we want to avoid spammers clogging up comments on older posts, and because we're less active we cannot respond to substantive comments on older posts. The 90 day threshold was reset recently by some upgrade (so automatically), but is now back to the 90-day rule, so replying to this will go into the approval folder, and the comment won't be approved. Any attempts to debate older posts on newer posts will be deleted, see the comments policy regarding being on-topic.

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