I don’t understand how anti-Semitism is a motivation for denying the Holocaust. You’d think that someone who hates Jews would think it was good the Holocaust happened, there was nothing wrong with it (other than it’s not lasting long enough), and that the Nazis are admirable specifically for deliberately killing a bunch of Jews (as opposed to accidentally killing them with typhus).
I think it goes the other way – they believe that Jews are evil liars, so they must have duped the rest of the world into believing in the Holocaust to serve their nefarious Jewish ends.
Clearly, there was no way to flush midichlorians out of a dark Jedi’s veins.
. this.
Considering they were lying to the people right up the moment the doors of the gas chambers closed behind them it’s logical they saw to it that such letters are created.
To the op, you don’t argue with these people. Walk away with your hand up and your head shaking.
What nefarious thing possibly requires us to get everyone to think we are pathetic shnooks who lost six million of our population in degrading ways? If we’re going to lie about ourselves, we’re going to come up with something better than that.
Israel. Also making Hitler look bad. But the claim the holocaust deniers make is that Jews made up the Holocaust to guilt the world into creating Israel
There is a great deal of cognitive dissonance that goes into Holocaust denial; those who espouse it often also use it to ‘prove’ why the Jews should all be killed since they are so evil. Also, anyone who is a serious Holocaust denier knows they are lying; its flatly impossible to dig through the mountain of historical records and evidence of mass murder to cherry-pick some bit of nonsense to quibble about and take it as proof that the Holocaust didn’t happen without knowing you’ve deliberately turned a blind eye to that mountain of incontrovertible proof that it did happen. Authors like David Irving know damn well they are lying.
- I haven’t read through the various analyses closely enough to say with confidence, so I’ll go with the 6 million figure. The Jewish Virtual Library has an estimate of 5,933,900 regarding jews killed overall.
The history of the use of the figure is intriguing. Apparently, Martin Broszat, the late director of the German Government’s Institute for Contempory History has acknowledged though that the 6 million figure is symbolic. Benjamin Blech writes of an ancient prophecy in the Torah that promises the Jews their return to the Promised Land after a loss of six million of their number (B. Blech, The Secret of Hebrew Words, Jason Aronson, Northvale, NJ, 1991, p. 214).
It seems that soviet writer Ilya Ehrenburg publicized the 6 million figure in January 1945, before Auschwitz was liberated and months before the war finished.
Going back further in 1900, the Rabbi Stephen Wise stated “There are 6,000,000 living, bleeding, suffering arguments in favor of Zionism”. Thereafter there are various references to that figure being at risk in Eastern Europe., for example:
- I didn’t question the number that perished. The doubt I was expressing in my posts above were about the use of gassing given the various inconsistencies. As Princeton academic Adorno Mayer wrote in “Why Did the Heavens Not Darken?: The Final Solution in History”, “[s]ources for the study of the gas chambers are at once rare and unreliable” and “There is no denying the many contradictions, ambiguities, and errors in the existing sources.” Mayer, nonetheless does consider they were used for that purpose though.
Do you believe that it was the goal and policy of Hitler and the Nazis to kill all the Jews in Europe?
This is silly. There are inconsistencies in every historical record because different events are perceived differently, human memory is flawed, and records are incomplete.
As Nizkor notes, however, it is the convergence of all the evidence that points to the reality that gas chambers were used at multiple (not necessarily all) camps.
Harry Hinsley is, as usual, correct here. However, he’d have no doubt also acknowledged, were he aware that he was going to be quoted in this way, that we also know that Auschwitz was told to stop sending such information by radio in August 1942 (see Richard Breitman, Official Secrets, 1998; Penguin, 2000, p115).
For, despite popular perceptions, the Germans never regarded Enigma as necessarily absolutely secure. Some stuff was always sufficiently secret that it never sent over the air. It went in writing.
The function of Auschwitz as a slave labour camp was a far lesser secret than its role as a death camp. If they developed qualms about sending death tolls amongst the registered prison population of the camp by radio, there’s no reason to believe that they ever sent anything about the much, much larger numbers of unregistered prisoners killed in the gas chambers in that way. Berlin got those numbers on paper.
Actually, Triumph and Tragedy does refer to them obliquely, since it quotes the July 1944 memo he sent Eden:
It’s difficult to see what “by scientific machinery” could otherwise refer to.
David Reynolds suggests in his In Command of History (Allen Lane, 2004), his brilliant examination of Churchill’s history and its biases, that this memo is also why he didn’t say anything more in it. He had wanted Auschwitz stopped, but the memo disappeared into the Whitehall bureaucracy and the idea was killed by officials, without any subsequent follow through from him. He thus wanted to skirt around the issue, not because he doubted the gas chambers, but precisely because he was all too aware of them, yet knew that he had effectively failed to do anything about them.
"He admitted being on the arrival ramp at Birkenau several times and helping to Select inmates to be sent to the gas chambers but for the most part, he insisted, “my job consisted of keeping peace and quiet in the camp.” He said that each day, “the SS doctors would be told by the camp commandant how many of the new arrivals were to be spared for work gangs and how many were to be killed.”
…
Under questioning by presiding Judge Hans Hofmeyer, Hofmann at first denied, then admitted he had personally sent 40 to 50 children, ages six to 12, to the gas chambers.’
http://www.auschwitz.dk/gerstein.htm
*One of the most horrifying testimonies from the horrors of the Holocaust was left by a conscience-stricken SS officer, Kurt Gerstein, who visited the deathcamps Belzec and Treblinka in August 1942 and witnessed the mass gassing of Jewish men, women and children. Gerstein was shocked by what he had seen. Yet, he realized that as a witness, his position was unique, and he was determined to expose what he knew to the world to stop the atrocities: “I was one of the handful of people who had seen every corner of the establishment, and certainly the only one to have visited it as an enemy of this gang of murderers …”
As he noted in his post-war testimony:
“I prayed with them and cried out to my God and theirs. How glad I should have been to go into the gas chambers with them! How gladly I should have died the same death as theirs! Then an SS officer in uniform would have been found in the gas chambers. People would have believed it was an accident and the story would have been buried and forgotten. But I could not do this yet. I felt I must not succumb to the temptation to die with these people. I now knew a great deal about these murders.”
His report was one of the first and most important documents relating to the extermination of Jews in the death camps, including facts and events that Gerstein personally witnessed. After the war the basic facts of Gerstein’s report were verified by SS Obersturmbannführer Dr. W. Pfannenstiel before the Land-Court of Darmstadt in the Federal Republic of Germany, on June 6, 1950.*
*In the years 1942 and 1943, he attended the extermination camps of Belzec, where he personally witnessed, in August 1942, the gassing of Jews.
…Pfannenstiel was with Kurt Gerstein in Belzec concentration camp in August 1942 during which he witnessed the botched gassing of Jews from Lwów, an episode which Gerstein included in the subsequently named Gerstein Report and which is partly corroborated in the report of Wehrmacht NCO Wilhelm Cornides.[3]
Pfannenstiel’s independent testimony of what he witnessed differed in some respects to Gerstein’s but still added a degree of veracity in that they were both there that day and did witness the gassing.
After 1941, Pfannenstiel held the rank of SS - Obersturmbannführer. He was promoted to SS Standartenführer in 1944.
From the deposition of Wilhelm Pfannenstiel before the Darmstadt Court, June 6, 1950:
While the Jews were being taken in, the rooms were lit up with electric light and everything passed off peacefully. But when the lights were turned off, loud cries burst out inside, which then gradually died away. As soon as everything was quiet again, the doors in the outside walls were opened, the corpses were brought out, and, after being searched for gold teeth, they were stacked in a trench.*
There, that’s three Nazis who personally confessed to seeing the Jews gassed to death at a Death camp.
The trouble I have is that there is also a convergence of evidence that points to them being used for delousing to combat typhus. That is consistent with the US, British & German medical records & the Red Cross. It’s also the issue of why there is blue Zyklon-B residue in the delousing chambers at Auschwitz, but apparently not in the claimed homicidal gas chambers.
When I refer to inconsistencies, I don’t mean minor details. I mean that various major claims that were originally made based on eyewitness testimony and confessions of those in charge in certain camps that were subsequently found to be false.
It seems quite significant to have originally claimed gas chambers were used to kill people in German camps such as Dachau, Buchenwald & Ravensbrück. Again - that’s based on eyewitness testimony. In the case of Ravensbrück, in Northern Germany, the camp officials (Suhren, Schwarzhuber and Treite) repeatedly confessed to the Tribunal to the existence of a “gas chamber” in their camp.
When US pathologist Larson performed autopsies at in Germany he apparently didn’t find cases of gassing. Paul Rassinier also pointed out that it wasn’t correct.
Then in 1960 Dr Broszat writes that actually gas chambers weren’t used to kill people on German soil. Why were those eyewitness testimonies & confessions deemed unreliable?
The camps in Poland such as Auschwitz were off limits to western investigators as they were occupied by the Soviets.
Thanks for the references. As noted above there were also confessions from Nazi camp officials at Ravensbrück about inmates being gassed. That is no longer accepted as correct.
You could also point to confession of the commandant at Auschwitz, Hoess, it’s well documented now that he was tortured, something that US Judge van Roden noted happened to numerous German witnesses. So I take the confessions with a grain of salt!
JUDGE EDWARD L VAN RODEN The Progressive, February 1949, p. 21f
Chen, do you believe that it was the goal and policy of Hitler and the Nazis to kill all the Jews in Europe?
How do you perform an autopsy on ashes? The Jews that were gassed went “up the chimney”, in Auschwitz parlance.
The homocidal gas chambers were all destroyed before the allies got there. Replicas were built after the war.
Ravensberg?
*Periodically, the SS authorities subjected prisoners in the camp to “selections” in which the Germans isolated those prisoners considered too weak or injured to work and killed them. At first, “selected” prisoners were shot. Beginning in 1942, in accordance with “Operation 14f 13,” the SS transferred them to the sanitarium at Bernberg, which, equipped with gas chambers, had served as a killing center for people with physical and intellectual disabilities within the framework of the so-called “euthanasia” program of the Nazi regime. The SS sent around 1,600 female prisoners and 300 male prisoners to their deaths at Bernberg in the spring of 1942; around half of these prisoners were Jewish, at least 25 were Sinti and Roma (Gypsies), and at least 13 were Jehovah’s Witnesses.
Camp authorities initiated a second round of killings at such “euthanasia” killing centers later in 1942, continuing until 1944. During this phase, around sixty transports left Ravensbrück for the “euthanasia” killing center at Hartheim, near Linz, Austria with between 60 and 1,000 prisoners each. The SS staff also murdered prisoners in the camp infirmary by lethal injection or by transferring them to the Auschwitz-Birkenau killing center. In early 1945, the SS constructed a gas chamber in Ravensbrück near the camp crematorium. The Germans gassed between 5,000 and 6,000 prisoners at Ravensbrück before Soviet troops liberated the camp in April 1945*.
As for JUDGE EDWARD L VAN RODEN -That site is by a notorious and discredited Holocaust denier. wiki:
*Irving’s reputation as a historian was discredited after he brought an unsuccessful libel case against the American historian Deborah Lipstadt and Penguin Books.[3] The English court found that Irving was an active Holocaust denier, antisemite, and racist,[4] who “for his own ideological reasons persistently and deliberately misrepresented and manipulated historical evidence”.[4][5] Additionally, the court found that Irving’s books had distorted the history of Hitler’s role in the Holocaust in order to depict Hitler in a favourable light.
*
And that testimony is about the trial of the Malmedy Massacre , nothing to do with the Holocaust except that they used Dachau.
I knew already that other famous concentration camps also did not gass the inmates, but you are making a distinction without a difference about Ravensbrück, as it happened with many camps back them, they usually were a complex of buildings in an area and the camp did send a number of inmates to the gas chambers “serving” that area.
I will have to make another point here, I researched the locations and Ravensbrück was just on the other side of a small lake separating it from Fürstenberg. Claiming that there were no gas chambers in Ravensbrück is like a Latin American dictator claiming that no one died in a protest in an infamous plaza in the capital city. Sure, the people actually were massacred in the road next to it or taken to unknown locations for “disposal” so I guess the dictator who ordered the removal of the people by force could claim innocence…
Yeah right, that only works in the mind of the dictator and the mass murderers.
Of course now that we know that the main point stands: death gas chambers did exist in camps like Auschwitz and several others.
While Höss’ affidavit after his arrest probably followed a beating, he was alive for another year in which he was fairly apathetic about his actions and openly spoke of his role in gassing Jews. He even wrote an autobiography about it. Were you unaware of these simple facts or did you choose to ignore them in the hopes that casting doubt on the affidavit would be enough to negate everything relating to Höss?
Here’s what I don’t get about all this. If I sat down and made a list of every evil thing you could do to a person, the Germans are undeniably guilty of every single one of them on a massive scale. In fact, I probably wouldn’t put “gassing people” on that list because it’s such a specific thing to the Nazis and requires such a specific infrastructure and circumstances to support it.
But the Nazis targeted millions of people for genocide for racist reasons, rounded up millions of them, imprisoned them, treated them like animals, forced them into slave labor and sex slavery, starved them, tortured them, performed medical experiments on them, forced abortions or killed babies after birth, euthanized and murdered them on a massive massive scale. And we’re not talking mistreatment of military prisoners here, but of innocent men, women and children. And yes, many did die of disease in the inhumane conditions in which they were imprisoned, but many were also murdered. There are many photos of Nazis executing men, women and children in front of mass graves. While you agree that an estimated 6 million Jews died, there were just as many, if not more, people from other groups who died as well.
There are millions of pieces of evidence that the above is all true. Wouldn’t you agree that these things happened? Wouldn’t you agree that the Nazis targeted groups of people they considered “subhuman” and not part of the “master race,” treated all of them in the most inhumane ways possible and murdered many of them?
So, if Obama went on TV and said that he’d demanded access to Area 51 and found, not aliens, but proof that the Nazis never gassed anyone, what difference would it make? Gassing aside, do you agree that the Nazis were racists guilty of some of the most horrific, disgusting and evil crimes that you can imagine on a massive scale against millions of people?
Rassinier is not a good authority on which to rest your “case”. He shifted his claims repeatedly over the years, first acknowledging that extermination by gassing took place (but that there were fewer such installations than had been reported), then proceeded to deny that any such killings had taken place at all. At one time he blamed Communist inmates instead of the SS for bad conditions at Buchenwald (Communists had a limited role in policing themselves), and also argued that Jews were responsible for how they were treated. Deborah Lipstadt seems to have Rassinier’s number.
*"Paul Rassinier…was arrested and interned in concentration camps, among them Buchenwald. In 1948 he published a book Crossing the Line, in which he argued that people might have been killed in concentration camps, but that the perpetrators had acted on their own, not on orders from headquarters.
"Rassinier initially admitted that people had been killed by being gassed, which he claimed was a local initiative and not the responsibility of the central Nazi system. Later he denied the existence of the gas chambers altogether. This argument was repeated by Louis Darquier de Pellepoix, who had been Commissioner for Jewish Affairs of the notorious French Vichy government for several years. In an infamous interview in 1978, which drew widespread criticism, he told the French weekly L’Express that the Holocaust was a hoax and that only lice were gassed in Auschwitz. Rassinier also claimed that the concentration camps were not a German invention, and that many other countries had used them, including France. This is an early example of the balancing acts Irving and later deniers applied.
“The first generation of post-war deniers, to which both Bardeche and Rassinier belonged, justified Nazi anti-Semitism by asserting that the Jews were responsible for their own suffering, since they had caused Germany’s financial and political problems. Later deniers abandoned this line of argument, because they felt it undermined whatever credibility they had.”*
I hope it is OK to link to this excerpt from Stephen Atkins’ book regarding Rassinier (the book title incorporates the Forbidden Phrase).*
I have yet to see a single example of a prominent Holocaust “revisionist” engaged in attempts to overturn the essential story of what happened, who was not also an anti-Semite. These two things are irretrievably entwined.
*Can we look forward to a ban on the use of the term “antivaxer” in GD and other forums, since antivaccine advocates argue that it unfairly stigmatizes them?