I’ve had no success finding Mr. Novy through a quick Google search. There’s mention of a Josef Novy at Auschwitz, but with a different prisoner number. Perhaps someone else could do better?
Josef and Novy are both common names. I’m surprised there was only one. It’s about as common as say, Richard Johnson in the US. In other words, not the most common name on the books, but there’s a fair chance that someone has met a Richard Johnson. Or if you live in the former Czechoslovakia, a Josef Novy. Josef is a screamingly common Jewish name, in Eastern Europe, but also a very common gentile name among both Czechs and Slovaks. Kind of like David in the US.
The Germans were pretty fanatical about tracking prisoners by number. If a Josef Novy doesn’t have the same number, it’s probably a different person. Was that number ever assigned to anyone? Was it even an Auschwitz number?
Here’s a tough and controversial question: is it necessarily and obviously true that all Holocaust deniers are all anti-Semitic?
Conspiracy theorists are nutburgers as a class. Must one be anti-Semitic to deny the Holocaust? Or could he or she just simply be batshit crazy without actually hating Jews?
You could say the same regarding the US infantrymen dead and dying, emaciated inmates, at Dachau, Buchenwald, Dora, Mauthausen, and other work and detention camps.
It’s also consistent with supply lines breaking down, and food not getting to camps and people dying of starvation and disease.
As I noted above, it was originally claimed based on eyewitness testimony that people in these camps were being gassed. The US forces, which liberated Dachau announced the discovery of a mass-murder “gas chamber” and released a photograph of it.
The anticlimactic truth was that it was a gas chamber for disinfecting clothes contaminated by lice.
Similarly, immediately after the war there was eyewitness “testimony” about the “Buchenwald gas chamber.” Again, that is no longer accepted.
Probaby the most famous of the atrocities that were seriously alleged at the trials are now rejected by even establishment historians as false, are the stories that Jewish bodies were made into soap and their skin was made into lampshades. That is now seen as war propaganda, just as were similar stories in WW1 about ‘Huns’ who were ‘bayonetting babies’.
A poster above, Dissonance queried my reference to “typhus outbreaks”. My understanding is that it is an incontestable fact that in concentration camps, including Auschwitz there were outbreaks of typhus at the end of the war and many people died as a result. This wasn’t a new problem - millions were affected by typhus in WWI.
What revisionists quite reasonably point out that Zyklon-B was used for delousing and combating typhus. Which seems a reasonable interpretation. The head of the SS camp administration office sent a directive dated Dec. 28, 1942, to Auschwitz and the other concentration camps. It criticised the high death rate of inmates due to disease, and ordered that *“camp physicians must use all means at their disposal to significantly reduce the death rate in the various camps.” *
There are various technical arguments about the existence of chemical residue indicating was used in delousing chambers where the German records state that it was used for delousing mattresses, clothing etc and a lack of residue where alleged gas chambers were used. I don’t find that evidence conclusive either way.
In terms of primary source documents there is the three-volume International Red Cross Report published in 1948. Volume III particularly describes the couple of thousand regular, routine inspection-visits that its doctors made through the war years to the Polish labour-camps. Their reports don’t indicate homicidal gassings, or mass-cremations were occurring.
Similarly, FH Hinsley’s summary of the British Intelligence decrypts from Auschwitz:
Winston Churchill published a six volume account of WWII and made no reference to gas chambers. Volume Six, is on Triumph and Tragedy, and published in 1953 so you expect to have referred to it.
There’s also the example of Marika Frank, a jewish women who arrived at Auschwitz-Birkenau from Hungary in July 1944, when 25,000 were apparently assed and cremated daily. She testified after the war that she heard and saw nothing of “gas chambers” during the time she was interned there. She heard the gassing stories only later. (Abrams, Voices from the Holocaust p.196)
Although, as noted above testimonial evidence doesn’t necessarily appear that reliable one way or the other.
Well start with the original revisionist - Paul Rassinier, who was an anti-nazi leftist & involved with the French Resistance. He was sent to concentration camps such as Buchenwald & Dora. He doesn’t seem a likely raving loon or anti-semite.
Hey Chen.
Did they or did they not gas and murder a large number of Jews, Gypsies, and other “inferiors” in Auschwitz (let’s say, over a million)? Yes or no.
See my comment above- I think there’s considerable doubt that gas was used to kill anyone, other than lice to prevent the spread of typhus.
Chen – did Hitler and the Nazis try to kill all the Jewish men, women, and children in Europe that they could? How many did they kill?
Good to know.
Jonathan Chance, is the term Holocaust Denier still off limits?
He’s correct on nothing, that’s not what he was pointing out, and if you actually read what he wrote
he’s clearly saying nobody was ever gassed by the Nazis. Referencing typhus outbreaks as being the actual cause of the deaths of Jews under the Nazis is a hallmark of holocaust denial coming straight out of the IHR, who have managed to hijack the term historical revisionism so successfully that it now has the connotation in the public mind as meaning historical denial when in fact actual historical revisionism was and is a perfectly acceptable thing. Historical revisionism had to be done in 1973ish when it more or less officially came out that the Allies had enjoyed enormous success decrypting German and Japanese ciphers in WW2 as part of Ultra/Magic. What the Institute for Historical Review does hasn’t anything to do with actual historical revisionism; it’s devoted entirely to Holocaust denial. The fact that it was founded by a member of the British National Front and has been run since 1995 by a member of the National Alliance, both white supremacist organizations, should be a dead giveaway.
I understand your feelings. However, it is correct to say there were no death camps in Germany, that Buchenwald & Dachau *were *Concentration camps not death camps. It’s also true there were a few Politicals at the Death camps who were not to be gassed. It’s also true that the stories which leaked out about the death camps were considered propaganda by many. (Mostly due to the fact that the British has a propensity for making up all sort of horrible war propaganda, like the Germans eating Belgian babies off the points of their bayonets during WWI)
However, I was hoping that that post wouldnt lead to some sort of a attempt to show there were no death camps at all. 
Unfortunately it did. He indeed started off with some true but misleading facts, but now has gone into the realm of a classic denier.
Auschwitz, Bełżec , Chełmno, Treblinka, etc were Extermination Camps or Death Camps. Jews, etc were gassed and killed in those camps in huge numbers. To claim otherwise is to a to be Denier.
ISTM that Chen’s argument, FWIW (i.e. not much) is that since people at one point claimed that the German concentration camps were death camps and this was later shown to be incorrect, therefore current claims about Auschwitz et al can be similarly dismissed.
In general, the MO of Holocaust deniers seems to be based on two factors. 1) is that the most publicized aspect of the Holocaust, the gas chambers at Auschwitz, has relatively little evidence for it - pretty much everyone who went in never came out, there are few if any smoking gun memos from Nazis about it, and as for confessions - well they could have been coerced. And 2) is that like virtually every other historical fact, there are some memories and eyewitness accounts of events which turn out to have been mistaken*. So what Holocaust deniers do is focus on these relatively weak links to the exclusion of everything else, and end up with “Holocaust = Gas Chambers = weak evidence”, and they’re home free and can focus on the evils of the Jews who invented the Holocaust in order to get Reparations and establish the State of Israel.
[*There’s an elderly Holocaust survivor in my neighborhood - went through the Warsaw Ghetto and then years in various concentration camps - who told me he once heard a friend and fellow survivor being interviewed on the radio, and that guy said things that he personally witnessed and knew to be incorrect. His first thought was to call in to the station and dispute them, but then he figured he would just be playing into the hands of deniers, and let it go.]
Chen019, the biggest questions regarding the Holocaust beg your response:
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Approximately how many prisoners died at the hands of the Nazis (whether by gassing, neglect, outright execution, or otherwise)?
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If you don’t believe that approximately 6 million Jews were exterminated, then where did they all go?
There are some in that class. I know of one who believes it couldn’t have happened, because the German people are good, kind, sweet-natured, generous, and decent, and never would have participated in something that rotten. He’s been to Germany many times and knows the people well.
His reasoning is incredibly naïve, and his conclusion is contra-factual. But at least it’s not based on anti-Semitism.
I imagine that some deniers are motivated only by the desire to stir up trouble and/or to go against the grain. I think that’s just a small majority, and it doesn’t make them any better.
I’d consider the Aktion T4 facilities to be death camps: facilities built or refurbished for the sole purpose of executing their inmates. Many of those facilities were in Germany proper, like Grafeneck and Brandenburg. Both of those places were used to execute nearly 10,000 each of the insane and physically disabled, and about 70,000 people total were killed during the official T4 program.
Agreed that those are nowhere near the numbers of those killed at someplace like Treblinka, but still worth considering, IMHO.
True, good point, but since even in the USA we had eugenics-based compulsory sterilization, this could even be considered just a weird bad thing the world was going thru. In a few USA locations, there were even some unsanctioned eugenics-based Euthanasia killings.
Also note the Nazis cancelled that program in 1941.
Perhaps you’re just not used to running into IHR Holocaust denial types (which probably leads to a happier life), but the first post claimed there were no death camps at all; it didn’t lead to going into the realms of a classical denier. It started there; he was saying that there was no gassing of Jews at Auschwitz, it was all propaganda and any deaths were the result of typhus.
Saying that gas chambers were used for killing lice on inmates is like saying that lethal injection is done to kill bacteria inside a condemned person’s veins.