I am of partial Czech ancestry and, if being from Lidice was the punishment for his death, I would take some pleasure from my death.
You really do not fuck with us Bohunks.
What I want to know is why is human_extinction so insistent on proving that the Holocaust was wrong? Why is he making it such a personal mission to disprove it?
Why would anyone be doing this without an ulterior motive of anti-Semitism? This guy has already made it clear that he’s against “Zionism” but in so many cases, “Zionism” is just a code word for “anti-Semitism” that anti-Semites use to cover their asses. “I’m not anti-Semitic, I’m just anti-Zionist” is a really common tactic for genuine anti-Semites to take these days.
No, they are not right. There is extensive evidence that the death camps happened exactly as mainstream history recounts. In order to revise this view of history in an academically legitimate way there would have to be an exhaustive explanation of where the six million mostly identifiable Jews went to or died from what causes other than the death camps and concentration camps. Then there are tens of thousands of eyewitness accounts by survivors and liberating troops. Those then have to be explained away. Each account. It is not enough to say it is a mathematical impracticality when there were eyewitnesses who participated and survived. Each one has to be explained as to why they were mistaken in what they saw. Then there were the criminal participants who described what it is they did as confessions. Those confessions, including Eichmann’s have to be explained away as false. Then the transportation records. Then the personal property confiscated. Then the building plans. This would have to be done carefully and in a scholarly way. Then there are well over 50,000 filmed survivor accounts. A wave of the hand and a ten minute explanation is academically insufficient. It is the assertion of a suspect anti-Semite against a pile of evidence that would be sufficient for admission to court, and has in many cases been admitted. Kooks like that are beneath contempt.
This. I was going to post, “in what universe is it a defense to say ‘we didn’t murder millions of people, we only worked them to death’?”
Don’t get side tracked defending (or for that matter attacking) Zionism, as there are good arguments for it and against it. The motive is anti-Semitism, and it is not ulterior. There are standards for making cases for historical revisionism, and one of them is exhaustively refuting the previous evidence. There is no better documented historical event than the Holocaust, the survivors and the liberators have cataloged more evidence for this event than any other historical event. Only tax collectors and evolutionists have databases that can rival the mountain of evidence.
Little Nemo: I did go to other sites and did not find anything refuting the main points of revisionists in question
RickJay: I don’t know how many times this has to be said, but neither the revisionists or anyone here are denying that the holocaust happened. Just the main facts (i.e. “what is the holocaust” “it was the deliberate slaughter of 6 million Jews”) are being critiqued.
Enuma: Way not to talk about the evidence at hand again.
SageRat: I’m pretty sure we know how much Zyklon-B was given to the Nazi’s - and the official holocaust historians admit that most of it was used for delousing (“95%”), but that somehow 5% was used as the primary means for “processing” all of these people. They also argue that the eyewitnesses are in no condition to testify to the gassing or organized mass murder because they were subjected to it as a threat while in the camps (“don’t misbehave or you’re going in the oven”) - also as victims they would have every reason to suspect the worst even if they didn’t actually see it.
Patty: That is certainly one of the main reasons why this interests me.
GIGObuster: Thanks for saving the thread, I’ll check out that stuff soon.
I’m not defending or attacking Zionism; what I’m saying is that “Zionist” has become a stand-in phrase for “Jew” among anti-Semites nowadays. And it has worked really, really, really, really well, apparently, because it has the excellent ability to sidetrack a discussion of the Jews into a debate about Zionism, and distract people from the anti-Semite’s Jew-hatred. It is of course possible to be against Zionism and not be against the Jews, but really, come on - read Stormfront any day, or any other plainly anti-Semitic website, and you’ll see that the word “Zionist” has just taken the place that “Jew” occupied in literature of the Nazis.
Don’t thank me yet.
I need to see a source for your:
Because in the trial of Adolf Eichmann and other reports, I don’t see who admitted that most of it was used for delousing.
http://www.holocaust-history.org/auschwitz/chemistry/
And I did say “don’t thank me”, because your “pretty sure” take on the Zyklon B makes me doubt that you are just being a “devils advocate”.
Apparently you did not actually read the referenced column which mentioned at least two common revisionist claims above (the chamber doors, which are not the originals) and poor methodology in collecting samples of Zyklon-B from the walls. Furthermore, the column listed two books which debunk common claims of holocaust revisionists. Since you profess such open-mindedness on the subject, I presume you are going to obtain and read at least one of them before you make any definitive decision on the existence of the event.
But regardless, the key point from the column is this:
If you refuse to accept the last statement as factual, you are in effect stating that the Straight Dope newspaper column and its web site, have lied to their readers on this subject. Is that in fact your position?
At this point I must assume you are not as open-minded as you claim. It’s up to you to do any further research.
About on par with the 9/11 Truthers, though a bit more distasteful. All of these kinds of things tend along the same lines…mountains of evidence are hand waved away while the focus is on small and mostly inconsequential anomalies. For some reason people think that things should be neat and orderly, with every ‘T’ crossed and ‘I’ dotted, every piece of information available. Unfortunately real life is messy, and real events are chaotic, leaving anomalies and loose ends galore.
Personal anecdote…my mothers step father was there. You can add that to the mountain of evidence and do with it as you please. My feeling is that, like the 9/11 and Kennedy assassination CT type threads, there is no evidence that will be accepted by someone who really believes, while someone who is seriously open minded but curious should be convinced by a quick google search…
-XT
What evidence? You haven’t shown any legitimate evidence. You have shown yourself to have an agenda. To claim that a ‘work-camp’ is somehow not as bad as a ‘concentration-camp’ is morally repugnant and shows your bias.
I have been to Auschwitz. I have seen the remains of the ovens and the gas chambers. They are large enough to do what is said was done. The camp is large enough to contain the required ammount of bodies. The photographs of what was found in the ovens are grisly. The first-person accounts of allied troops who first entered the camp tell a story of an ugly extermination.
I am of German ancestry. My grandmother and her two oldest brothers came to America before WW2. Her youngest brother, Otto, was to young to emigrate. Grandma also had younger cousins who stayed in Germany. Grandma didn’t talk about them much.
When I was in my early 20’s, I asked my Grandma if any of our relatives had been Nazis. She got upset at my use of the term and told me about her brother Otto, who was drafted into the German army and sent to fight the Russians. He was among a large group of German soldiers who were captured by the Russians and then castrated. Otto, according to Grandma, was not the Nazi.
I pressed her as to what she meant by ‘the Nazi’? She told me about her cousin Hans who made his way over to America after the war. He was standing in a line of men at Ellis island when a doctor told them to take their shirts and t-shirts off so he could check them. The doctor looked at the eagle with talons holding a swastika tatooed on Hans’ chest and told him to put his shirt on and go back to Germany. He did.
I said, “Grandma, didn’t some concentration guards have that kind of tatoo on their chest?” After a bit of hesitation, she said, “Yes”. “Was Hans a concentration camp guard?” Again, “Yes”. “Did you ever ask him…?” Grandma cut me off and didn’t want to talk about it. I persisted, and when Grandma saw I wasn’t giving up, she said, “I will tell you this once. Yes, Hans was a concentration-camp guard. Yes, he told me they did what it is said they did. I don’t want to talk about it anymore, now go away.”
I saw I wasn’t getting anymore out of her and let it go. This may not be enough for you, but it is enough for me.
The two questions you have posed are dramatically different, and I would argue that the first is a current, lively and often heated debate among academics. The second, however, has long since been resolved. The number of Jews killed in the Holocaust varies from statistician - for example. we will never have an accurate count of the numbers of Jews executed summarily by the Einzatsgruppen in Eastern Europe. However, no academic worth their credentials would seriously suggest that there was not an intentional genocide at the hands of the Nazis.
Debating the means and method of how this mass-killing was carried out is different than debating whether or not there has been a world wide Jewish conspiracy to conflate the Holocaust in order to give Israel legitimacy. The insidiousness of the revisionists you’ve cited is that they cloak their work in academia but refuse to play by the same rules that serious academics use when conducting research. They dismiss eyewitness accounts (“too unreliable”), they dismiss documentation out of hand (“forgeries”), they discount facts that don’t support their agenda - I wont go through the list of all their tactics here, but suffice it to say that in short, they play dirty.
They are also woefully behind the times in terms of their areas of focus. For example, the Hitler order. Genocide scholars have recently begun to focus on the social aspects of genocide rather than focusing on the “great man theory.” There are still some intentionalists around, but for the most part, Holocaust research has long become dominated by the work of structuralists/functionalist scholars. Thus, the Hitler order is a moot point to a great extent. Second, the focus on Auschwitz is absurd. Say they did prove that not as many people died in that camp. We still have census numbers showing the population of Jews was radically reduced in the war years. Whether they died in Auschwitz, were shot in front of a mass grave, died in a ghetto, died of typhus or died as rebels in the forest, they were still victims of a systematic process that first dispossessed and then destroyed their culture, and that is a genocide by any definition. I recommend you read this article on Father Patrick Desbois for another view of how the Holocaust was executed: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/06/world/europe/06priest.html
It doesn’t do any good to attack the man, not the ball, in this way. All you do is feed into the man’s ability to believe that you won’t deal with the facts, and that you, not him, are politically motivated.
These boards are rife with people arguing like fury over things which they just happen to be interested in, for no particularly good reason other than a love for debate and knowing the truth.
Every assumption you make about the OP may be 100% true, but making those assumptions just makes you look bad and him look good, in my eyes.
We Dopers should be the ones dealing with the facts and the arguments. We should not be the ones using ad homs.
My uncle worked under the great John Ford during the war, in London, in the OSS. Some sort of film unit. My uncle actually went through spy training, although he never actually worked as a spy. But he was up in some planes flying over and behind enemy lines, filming them from above.
His unit in London developed all of the first footage of the concentration camps, making him among the first people in the world ever to see this. For the rest of his life, he had absolutely zero tolerance for fools who asserted it to be a hoax.
Hi h_e,
There’s a good book about the Holocaust “revisionists” by Deborah (Lipstadt? Maybe?) entitled “Denying the Holocaust”. I think you may find it interesting to see the history of that movement laid bare.
I’m one of those people you’re talking about. I just want to know the truth. That’s why I’m asking this OP why he’s so determined to prove the Holocaust wrong. I want to know the truth about it. I’m just asking a question. I’d like to have it answered.
Yes Holocaust deniers and revisionist are right that it should be completely legal to question and deny any aspect about the Holocaust. About most else they are wrong.
But putting David Irvin-s in jail is just pathetic.
Are you engaging in some sort of attempt to set a new record for disingenousness?
It’s a bit of a poor question if the spirit of inquiry is the point, though. “I can’t imagine why this person would be so very concerned with this, aside from anti-semitic views”, to paraphrase, isn’t the kind of comment that’s particularly conducive to debate. Princhester’s right; what his motivations are don’t matter as far as debate on this subject goes. All calling someone’s motivations out, especially in that fashion, will do is make them think you’re not interested in their actual points. And probably piss them off.
Right.
Let’s see how well that theory holds up if someone were to ask, “why don’t black people leave tips” or something else like that. Maybe that person’s worked at the same job for years and has never gotten a good tip from a black customer and he just wants to know why. But it’s unlikely that anyone would believe it was “just in the spirit of inquiry.”