I stumbled across some rather compelling information presented by Holocaust Revisionists, and of course one of the first things I do is post here to see how well it stands up to scrutiny. The newest thread I came across was http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?p=11599457
but alas, most of its scrutiny was in the form of personal attacks.
The source I found was http://holocaustdenialvideos.com/ - and I have not yet found any other compelling sources (though I haven’t done much research as of yet). The videos are definitely worth checking out even if only for the sake of debunking. What is the evidence for gas chambers (rather than showers and delousing houses), deliberate mass extermination (rather than tortuous work camps), and actuary tables for Jews and other victims at the various “death” camps (or what is the evidence debunking the claims that these didn’t take place as officially stated)?
Honestly, I did not wake up the other day and say, “hey, maybe I should question the holocaust today.” But as someone who considers himself open minded and objective, I have no choice but to leave any reactionary behavior aside for however long it takes to investigate the evidence. I hope you all reply with this in mind.
If I may offer a suggestion, asking people “Hey, go watch these movies” is not going to be a very inviting offer to debate. The website you link to has videos that are hours long, and the website is, frankly, not very appealing. If the videos contain compelling arguments, perhaps you could present some of them.
To get to the topic you want to discuss… the website appears to be primarily devoted to theories created by David Cole in the 1990s. Virtually all of Cole’s arguments had been debunked about a thousand times, and **Cole himself as admitted he was wrong. **
and then come back to briefly explain in what ways the writer of the linked column is full of shit, in the OP’s view. This would take at a lot less time than forcing participants in this thread to view hours of video, of dubious provenance.
You’re right, I was talking about David Cole’s and Bradley Smith’s claims - who both obviously admit that the holocaust happened, but think that its story should be modified due to lack of evidence for gas chambers and such. I watched a few of the videos on the site, and I’m not sure how to summarize, for example, the surprising lack of ability of the man from Skeptical Inquirer that Bradley was debating to refute anything that Bradley said on the Donahue show.
Also, can you provide the reference to where David Cole admitted he was wrong?
My dad was there in WWII. He was a non-com Major and had the Bronze Star, the Silver Star, some big deal French commendation for being cool under fire, and a lot of other medals . He saw the camps and prisoners.
Now maybe dad was lying to me, but I don’t think so.
Okay, I read that and it didn’t seem to address any of the claims I’ve heard from the revisionists: The ability of death camps to process football field sized mass graves, the lack of evidence that they could and did incinerate that many bodies in just a couple of months (and during winter outdoors), the ability of the official figure of “5% of Zyklon-B used as poisonous gas and the rest as delousing agent” to be anywhere near enough poison to kill that many people, the claims that the gas chamber doors opened from the inside and were really showers and delousing chambers, the modern day locations of most of the Zyklon-B traces supporting the delousing theory rather than any extermination theory, and therefore the fact that the Nazi’s made what should be called something like “work” camps rather than “death” camps.
The holocaust revisionists are not arguing that the camps didn’t exist; their primary evidence is based on the details of the camps. They are arguing that those were work camps and that the processing of Jews (“efficient mass murder”) was partially propaganda to keep the inmates of the work camp in line and partially an overreaction of eyewitnesses who found the many dead bodies that were in the camps (the majority of which were dead from disease and therefore burned to reduce spread) - and since then, the tendency to believe that a force can be completely evil so that military action can easily be justified (and also for Jewish sympathy to allow Israel invade so much of Palestine with US support).
If Bradley and Cole admit that the Holocaust happened, what’s the point?
Effectively almost all Holocaust denial can be broken into two sets:
Just lying, and
Refuting individually incorrect claims about the Holocaust.
#2 is the sort of crap David Cole and most of the really dedicated deniers engage in. It effectively amounts to taking a claim about the Holocaust that might in and of itself not be correct, presenting evidence it’s wrong, and then saying that disproves the Holocaust as a whole. To use the most famous example, deniers will say “Look, they claim lampshades were made of human skin. But that’s false. Therefore the existence of the Holocaust is doubtful.”
Obviously, that’s a logical hole you could throw an elephant through. Many people believe lots of things that are simply wrong about World War II, but that does’t mean the war never happened. Many people believe Columbus proved the earth was round in a world where most people thought it flat; that’s bullshit, but it doesn’t mean Columbus never existed. People seem to think the Vietnam War was wholly a fight betwene U.S. troops and elite guerrilla VC; it was nothing of the sort, but that doesn’t mean the Vietnam War was made up.
Or consider the various claims about the camps being unable to process X numbers of victims. Well, okay; suppose they could only process Y. Those arguments almost invariably set as figures to disprove figures than can only be guessed at anyway and are often made up by the revisionists themselves. Anyone with an inking of the history knows the figures for total victims are general guesses, and I would hope any reasonably well educated person knows that nobody thinks ALL the Holocaust victims were killed in gas chambers, or that every concentration camp was primarly dedicated to extermination.
I’m not sure how you would expect someone to respond to these statements.
Say for instance that I state with complete confidence that it wasn’t possible to land a person on the Moon. Well…so how do you refute that? “Yes, we can and could.” What more is there to say when a person has simply denied that something is possible.
We know it happened. We have people who saw it happen, and we have people who said that they did it. People can say that it is an infeasible task all they want, but like everything “reality trumps all”. It really happened, so whether you feel it’s infeasible or not, it is feasible. “Yes, they can and did.”
“If Bradley and Cole admit that the Holocaust happened, what’s the point?”
If Bradley and Cole’s revisionist history is correct, then what is the point of protesting it so forcefully and calling everyone who has questions a denier? In addition, there seems to be a point - I remember many months spent during grade school (oh so many years ago) reading several novels about the Holocaust that perpetually outlined (in detail that is only reviled by the Passion of the Christ) what happened at the death camps. We would spend a days of English class, for example, bringing in terrible bread (which was “so much better than the Jew’s saw-dust based bread”) and eating it. Why spend so much time building sympathy for specifically 6 million Jews when we know very well that repeating a death toll for one group of religious people is boarder-line Zionist when considering how many people the official historical account claims to have died (“11-17 million”). Furthermore, and possibly as a result, the philosophical and militaristic notions that result from an incorrect realization that allows us to view another people (the Nazi’s in this case) as non-human and evil (vs ourselves as good). This of course leads to a convenient and subjective history especially if Jews (and don’t forget the rest) weren’t exterminated in death camps manner. Removing the gap between what many hold to be the worst treatment of human life ever- and the severity of many other events (some of which that the US caused first hand) some of which are ongoing throughout the world is certainly a notion that would cripple the world views that hold “us” to be the force of good and justified in every sense. This may lead us to the uncomfortable realization that the holocaust may not be the largest offense against human life ever to happen on this earth, or maybe even around the world today and within the last few decades (much less during WWII).
This would mean that the holocaust was used as ammunition not only to help leverage the UN to give Israel permission to claim more of ‘their rightful’ land, but to invent the modern usage of the word “Nazi” to justify good against evil in whatever context we like. Cole and Bradley do not claim some massive conspiracy from the beginning in order for these things to happen, but rather some history was blown out of proportion by eyewitnesses suffering tortuous work camps that caused some advantageous leverage politically. This is my initial interpretation of holocaust revisionism, but please do your best to argue both with and against it using references and data. As you can see I am buying into a large portion of the revisionist theory, which is why I’m requiring (and expecting) some really good debunking from you straight dopers.
By the way, I still do not see where Cole admitted he was wrong about revisionism, so please make it more than obvious. Also, where did they say it disproves the holocaust as a whole? And what if evidence that only Y victims could be “processed” completely makes “processing x victims” look like an outright lie or distortion of history.
SageRat: I don’t see what the problem is. I say, “the Van Allen belt is radioactive and makes it impossible to visit the moon” - then you say “yes, but the radiation levels are minimized due to fly through time and the fact that NASA exits the earth toward holes in the belts - furthermore, the astronauts shield their film on the way back to protect it from damage.” In addition, holocaust revisionist claims should be even easier to address since we have the death camps on earth and we can visit and study them. Also, you have to say what “it” is because, as we have already stated, the revisionists don’t deny that the holocaust happened (merely that it didn’t happen as popularly stated).
Again, no evidence presented so far discounting Bradley’s and Cole’s primary arguments.
Hint: If you want to help out, then this isn’t some easy issue that you can just lookup on Wikipedia and say “see, you’re wrong.” If you can make an argument using the literature of the most popular holocaust historians, photographic or scientific evidence, then that would help a lot more.
It seems to me that, at some point in the future, the evidence will all be gone. All the eye witnesses will be dead, photographs and documents decayed and whatever is left of the gas chambers and other buildings will turn to rubble under the wheels of time.
So we need to come to an agreement and accept certain historical events as fact. We must document and provide assurance to our future generations that these things really happened, and that the vast majority of the present-day population did not make horrifying stories out of whole cloth.
Once accepted as fact, the validity of historical events is no longer up for debate by anyone but the looniest of loonies. Present company excepted, of course.
Yes but that’s not the example I gave. I said simply that a trip to the Moon was impossible. The only way to prove that it is possible is by doing it.
If I say, “That many bodies couldn’t be dispelled of in that much time.” The only proof is by re-enactment, or trusting that the people who say they did it, did it. Saying, “Ah but they did it very fast!” doesn’t really lend more plausibility since the speed at which they could do it is the very issue at hand. If the guy says that there wasn’t enough Zyklon B in existence, what more is there to say than that there indeed was?
If a person says that there’s an issue that would have to be gotten around, you can explain how that issue was gotten around. But if he simply says that something didn’t happen or couldn’t happen, all you can say is that it did and could. It’s really up to the viewer to find out what the truth of it is or to use common sense to figure out which one of them is the liar.
There’s something like a million eye witnesses. There’s diaries by Germans during the war talking about doing this stuff. The Germans admitted during the trials that they did it, and those who weren’t executed continued to say that they had done it. Their children believe that they did it. The children of Jews who were there believe that their parents testimony was truthful. So determining who is lying about whether there was enough Zyklon B or whether there was enough time to do all this really isn’t all that hard. Sure you could go and analyze old records for yourself to see how much Zyklon B was produced, where it was delivered to, etc. but unless you’re willing to do that, common sense is your only answer. Common sense is that it would take unimaginable effort and acting to end up with millions of people lying to their own children.
So do you think that ‘work-camps’ where millions die horrible inhumane useless deaths are somehow less objectionable than ‘concentration-camps’ where millions die horrible inhumane useless deaths?
If so, I don’t want you in charge of anything ever. EVER
Do you really think morality can be parsed that easily??
That’s an interesting question but not really relevant to whether or not the Holocaust happened. In any event the answer is obvious; because their arguments, such as they are, are used to deny the very existence of the Holocaust.
I do not see the relevance of any of this to the question of whether or not the Holocaust took place. Really, nobody cares what you did in grade school or whether it was “boarder-line Zionist,” whatever that means.
Return, please, to the facts. If you have arguments against the Holocaust’s having occurred, present them.
Dude, you are seriously late to the party. People on this very message board have said there are worse events in human history and have pointed out that there are strong arguments that Mao and Stalin murdered more than Hitler. It is a matter of historical record that Genghis Khan killed many more than Hitler. Many have argued that Communism killed more than Nazism, an argument which is very easy to support with objective evidence. You could make a pretty serious argument, in fact, that the Roman Empire was every bit as awful as the Nazi version. I mean, so what? These aren’t controversial arguments, they’re common historical discussion.
You’re creating a straw man - that the Holocaust is commonly elevated to the Worst Thing Ever and that any questioning of that is shot down. Well, I’m sorry, but that isn’t true. I’m sure Jews whose parents died in the Holocaust think so, but they would. And of course it happens to be an event that is recent enough to still be in people’s living memory. Suggesting “the Holocaust did not in fact kill as many people as, say, Genghis Khan” isn’t the slightest bit controversial among most people.
What does this have to do with whether or not the Holocaust happened?
And with due respect, the Nazis WERE evil. Nazism is repugnant, no matter how many Jews they killed or how they killed them.
Their primary arguments haven’t been presented to be discounted.
The failure of this argument is that the Nazis at the Wannsee Conference did not consider the “efficient mass murder” a propaganda ploy, for them efficient mass murder was the plan. They completed the details of how to make it happen at the conference.
One movie to check was the HBO production based on the minutes and testimony of the few surviving Nazis called Conspiracy:
The quote from the movie came from what Adolf Eichmann recollected.
