Okay, so I was talking with a friend today and she was telling me that her brother was saying that during the Holocaust the gas chambers and crematories never existed, that 6 million Jews died by being shot or from hunger. My friend gave a horrible explanantion of what her brother said so she tried to “simplify” it by just those few words. Personally, I believe they existed but what are others opinions and if you think they didnt exist can you find a scientific source or something?
I wouldn’t bother trying. There are people out there who think the world is flat, the moon landings were faked, and Star Trek Voyager was a good show. No matter how much evidence you provide these people that shows them to be wrong they’ll never change.
Marc
For a good amount of information regarding the Holocaust, check out
http://www.nizkor.org/.
On that site you can find descriptions (with references) of the gassing, responses to Holocausr deniers, and other information.
I don’t know if he’s be willing to listen, but the evidence is pretty overwhelming. Thousands of eyewitness accounts by survivors and guards, photographs, blueprints for a crematorium, large written orders for Zyclon B and forensic testing done on extant structures on site. Holocaust revisionism is ridiculously easy to refute if you’re talking to an intelligent person, but your friends brother doesn’t sound like one. Of course he may just be young and naive. Some of the revisionist literature can seem convincing if you don’t know anything else about this stuff.
For a good amount of information regarding the Holocaust, check out
http://www.nizkor.org/.
On that site you can find descriptions (with references) of the gassing, responses to Holocausr deniers, and other information.
If you read Ordinary Men: Police Battalion 101, as I did in my 20th Century Europe history class, you certainly get the impression that the majority of Hitler’s efforts to make the Reich “Judenfrei” were carried out by having guys ride into town, take all the Jews out into the forest, lay them face down and shoot them in the back of the head. That book is based on the activities of the Schutzpolizei battalion about which the records are most complete for historians.
People have certainly seen the gas chambers, but apparently not every internment camp was actually operating one. It wouldn’t surprise me if most of the Polish Jews died by bullets rather than gas. Which, IMHO, is way more brutal, those being personal killings that required pulling a trigger to kill someone in front of you rather than flipping a switch to kill people in another room.
BTW, the guy described in the OP doesn’t really sound like a Holocaust “denier”, as he actually thinks the Jews were killed. He merely seems skeptical of the particular methods in use to carry out that task. Gas chambers, bullets, or forced starvation, the outcome is the same. So if he’s thinking millions of Jews were killed by some means, he’s hardly apologizing for the Nazis, or any of those traditional underlying reasons for Holocaust conspiracy theories.
As the posters before me have already demonstrated, there is overwhelming evidence that the gas chambers did exist.
I’m afraid, however, that none of this evidence will make a bit of difference to your friend’s brother. Facts are powerless against willful ignorance.
In France, your friend’s brother could be prosecuted for making statements like that…
Alot of Jews were shot and starved, but the Gas chambers accounted for an appreciable (in the millions, making up the majority of the deaths)a very inefficient method of extermination and though szeable numbers were killed in this fashion, it only made up a small fraction of the total.Hunger and diease (resulting from conditons manufactured by the Nazis), do accout for a large fraction of the deaths but they were not as effective as the Gas Chambers which simply abattoirs for humans. Evidence for the Gas Chambers is overwhelming, eyewitness testimony from, surviors, guards and the soldiers liberating the camps, existing in abundance.
Alot of Jews were shot and starved, but the Gas chambers accounted for an appreciable (in the millions, making up the majority of the deaths)a very inefficient method of extermination and though szeable numbers were killed in this fashion, it only made up a small fraction of the total.Hunger and diease (resulting from conditons manufactured by the Nazis), do accout for a large fraction of the deaths but they were not as effective as the Gas Chambers which simply abattoirs for humans. Evidence for the Gas Chambers is overwhelming, eyewitness testimony from, surviors, guards and the soldiers liberating the camps, existing in abundance.
Well, at least your friend isn’t denying that millions of Jews were murdered.
It is true that not all the Jews killed during the holocaust were gassed, and it is entirely possible the majority were not gassed. Exact totals on the number of people murdered are hard to pin down because a great many Jews were simply slaughtered in the field, as the SS rampaged through the countryside behind the advancing German army. It could have been 5 million, 6 million, or 7 million, or some other number, plus you had millions more non-Jewish victims of the same murderous apparatus.
Millions of Jews were shot, burned alive, starved, or died of disease in concentration camps. It’s likely that the majority of Jewish victims didn’t live long enough to get to the gas chambers. However, the gas chambers did in fact exist, and accounted for at least 2-3 million deaths. The evidence that they existed is frankly beyond the realm of any reasonable question; it’s the same as the evidence that the Berlin Wall existed.
What about the 6 million non-Jews also murdered?How come people associate this crime only with the Jews?Never mentioning this is nearly as bad as denying the holocaust.
What your friend’s brother probably heard was the results of a chemical test made by a man several years ago. The man (whose name I don’t recall) took samples from the walls of a concentration camp gas chamber and found they supposedly did not contain the chemical traces they should have if they had been exposed to the gas. From this, the man deduced that the gas chamber had never been actually used.
A number of subsequent tests have demonstrated that the man’s original testing procedure was faulty and have found the chemical traces that do prove a history of gas exposure.
You may be thinking of the man featured in the Errol Morris documentary Mr. Death: The Rise and Fall of Fred A. Leuchter, Jr. (1999). At the request of Ernst Zundel, Leuchter obtained and tested bricks from a gas chamber. His tests showed little cyanide. However, he had preformed his tests incorrectly. Apparently cyanide only penetrates as deep as 1/10th the width of a human hair. Leuchter took chunks of brick and ground them, thus significantly diluting any surface arsenic.
Well, frankly, you could legitimately claim the Germans killed even more than that, 30 million at least, if you start with the assumption that they started the war that killed all those people.
The reason the Holocaust is distinguished as a separate event is beause it WAS a separate event. It was not an inherent part of the war, and was clearly a separate, distinct effort.
There seems to be some perceived political symbolism attached to the gas chambers.
I think it’s related to the assertion above that to shoot someone in the head is more brutal than a gas chamber, since it requires pulling a trigger to kill someone right in front of you. In contrast, the chamber is associated with dehumanization, which one would hope would be required to kill innocent beings.
I think this is why people sometimes have a violent reaction to what I would call ‘gas-chamber deniers’-- the people who say that the gas chambers didn’t exist, or didn’t kill so many people. The deniers seem to be saying that so many of the Germans were inhuman, while we’d prefer to believe they were mislead and that the technology helped mislead them.
On the other hand, they may just be wary of a slippery slope. The gas-chamber deniers would say. There were no gas chambers, so is it possible that six million were killed? Then they would do real reseach showing that only so many bullets were produced, and so many were used in battle, leaving only some number less than 6,000,000. Etc.
I saw that documentary, Paper, and I was coming here to post about it! It seems you beat me to it.
I thnk the majority of Polish Jews ended up in the gas chambers or concentrations camps. The daeth squads concerned themselves more with eliminating any potential resistance by decapitaing the Poles. Every known polish intellectual, politician, and priest was killed, if they could find them. And they did find most of them. And yes, there were many concentration camps that did not have gas chambers.
Not really. It wasn’t an automated system. People opened up the barrels like sardine cans, pulled out tns of Zyklon, rolled them back like Sardine cans (gas masks on) and them chucked them into the showers fro a side alcove or the roof.
BY this time, many people had figured out they were going to die horribly, and had begun to weep and wail. Those who happened to stand near the Zyklon tins being trhown in would tend to take a deep breathe reaction and collapse, dying very fast. The others would twist in agony and terror, clawing at their own chests and often dislocating limbs toin their struggle to breathe non-toxic air.
Eventually they all died. It sometime stook 15 minutes or more. The guards had to lok in after a while and see if they were all dead.
The wost part is the brick he took (I think illegally) may not have been an original at all! The camp was partly rebuilt (it is 50 years old, afer all) and not all the gas house was left.
Yes, 6 million non-Jews also died during the Holocaust (including my great-aunt who was a Lithuanian Catholic).
But 3 out of every 5 Jews in Europe died. 60%
That is why the Jewish numbers are so harrowing.
Well, right.
People being shot, people starving, people dying of disease are still everyday occurrences (esp. in war), even when the scale is so horrible as it was under the Nazis.
But to consider that a great many people actually went to a great deal of expense and trouble to conceive, design, finance, manufacture, build, test, refine, and operate a facility whose sole purpose was to slaughter defenseless human beings is staggering. Can you imagine being a secretary and opening your boss’s mail to see “Architectural Renderings for Proposed Gas Chamber” or “Memo from Auschwitz: Field results and suggestions for improvement of the effectiveness of Zyklon-B’s killing power” or some such thing?
The scope of such evil is staggering. It can’t be explained away by neglect or lack of resources (as with disease, starvation) or dismissed as the actions of a few fanatical hotheads acting alone and outside the scope of their orders (shooting people in the woods). It was deliberate, calculated, and carefully plotted down to the last detail and dollar.
It’s something that’s hard to wrap your head around. Some people just refuse to believe it, no matter how much evidence there is.