What evidence is there that the holocaust did not exist? Many books have been written by holocaust deniers who say that six million Jews did not die. I have never read these books but I would like to know what they have to say. I don’t understand why people try to suppress these books. If they are full of garbage, which they certainly must, don’t they discredit themselves?
Also, I heard somewhere that the Germans were such good record keepers that we actually know the names of the six million victims of concentration camps. Is this true?
The vast majority of the evidence is simply taking things out of context, ignoring other things, and accusing the Jews (or Americans, Germans or anybody else) of a massive conspiracy.
Some countries in Europe, especially Germany, have strong laws against hate speech and classify these dumb books as such, banning them. This concept is quite alien to most Americans (including this one) but those crazy Europeans seem to dig it.
The Nazis were obsessed with record keeping and documented everything. I don’t know if they documented the names of every single person killed, but they documented most of them.
There’s a huge warehouse in Germany full of Nazi records and documents which is maintained by an international organization of some sort (I forgot the details). They have a full time staff which researches individual histories there.
When I last looked into the topic (admittedly it’s been a number of years), Holocaust revisionists were members of fringe groups, trying to put an academic face on their antisemitism. They had no actual evidence, but, of course, that’s because the Zionists had destroyed it all.
How is it possible to PROVE that something did not exist?
If you show 10,000 instances of where something did not exist, what of the next one, and the one after that, on, and on.
If it can be readily shown that something DID exist, just one instance is sufficient.
Those who deny the holocaust have an axe to grind, are unwilling to examine the evidence or have a problem that is not amenable to evidence and facts.
The holocaust deniers are “true believers” in their denial.
Just as a beleiver of the “Flat Earth” persuasion is firmly attatched to it and can not be convinced othwerwise.
Other theories have their convinced adherents and will steadfastly cling to their erroneous beliefs in the face of evidence to the contrary.
Not by a long margin. Most of the victims were either brutally rounded up and shot near to where they lived or transported to death camps where they were gassed without being registered as an individual.
What is true is that in most such cases the massacres or transfers were recorded, together with at least rough numbers of those killed. The German records alone are thus able to confirm that many millions of Jews were killed. But individual names were not specifically recorded in most cases.
It’s a common tactic of Holocaust deniers to demand an excessive level of evidence. Not every name has to have been recorded for us to conclude beyond all sensible doubt that millions of Jews were deliberately killed.
In fact, we’re about to get a good look at them.
Actually, not really. Well… indeed, they minimize the number of deaths, but so did historians who aren’t revisionists. The point of revisionism isn’t to deny that many Jews died, but to deny that there was a concerted plan to exterminate them.
So, generally, they minimize the number of victims (and often state they were deliberatly inflated after the war) and more importantly dispute the causes of the deaths. Most famously, they deny the existence of gas chambers, for instance. Instead, they say that most deaths were the result of malnourishment, diseases, etc… which wouldn’t be surprising in crowded camps in time of war (see for instance german camps for russian prisonners, and the reverse. these had awful death rates).They of course deny that german leaders ever ordered the “final solution”.
And contrarily to what most people think, besides testimonies, there aren’t that much material evidences about the extermination of Jews. Gas chambers were destroyed, for instance, and showing on the basis of external sources that they were actually used to kill people, or that the Zyklon-B wasn’t used to disinfect vermin-infested clothes has proven to be quite difficult. Contrarily to the statements of some posters, the nazis didn’t leave many records, either. There were orders like “deport them” not orders like “deport them so that we can kill them”. There was no “Today : 632 Jews shot in the head” bookeeping. I’ve here a copy of a record from a concentration camp. The only infos are : name, town of origin, date. That’s what was recorded at the time the persons entered the camp. There’s no record of their death. And in many cases, not even such individual records would have existed. And if they did, they’re likely to have been destroyed when the camps were evacuated.
As for the testimonies, how do they deal with them? Well…For instance they say : you state that people were gazed. How do you know that? Oh! You didn’t see it? That’s just what you were told? A rumor in the camp? Like there aren’t many weird rumors circulating in camps. Well…just hearsay… come with an actual proof next time.
Holocaust deniers also operate a lot like Creationists - finding slight flaws in otherwise rock-solid research, and raising supposedly major objections that actually only address a small aspect of the story.
There’s not a lot of meaning in looking for “evidence the Holocaust didn’t happen,” for reasons already specified (you can never prove something DIDN’T happen). Check the Wikipedia article on Holocaust denial for a list of their general points, though.
Oh, and re. the anti-Nazi laws in Europe - it’s not what you might expect from the otherwise liberal Europeans, but it’s most likely necessary (in my opinion) to prevent a recurrence of Nazism and fascism. Or at least was for many years. I’m not sure it should be a CRIME to deny the Holocaust, but it goes to show the culpability Germans feel for what happened.
Holocaust deniers user what is a common tactic that is used to “disprove” all sorts of things (evolution, 9/11, the Kennedy Assassination, etc.).
- Raise objections. Ignore any attempt to disprove the objections; merely raising them disproves things.
- Repeat the same discredited stories over and over.
- Object to one element of the entire picture and claim you’ve disproven the entire picture.
- Ignore any evidence that disproves your claim.
- Don’t put forth any coherent explantion in place of what you’re objecting to: merely objecting is enough to prove your case.
Really? From what I heard, most starved to death in work camps. Got a Cite?
No one sane denies that millions of Jews died, and they died at the hands of the Nazis.
Some just say that many others died other than Jews- Gypsies, Slavs, Gays- and that these “others’ don’t get much press. IMHO, they are right. Estimates vary as to the numbers, and why they died (many millions of Slavs died in work camps- but did they die because of racism, or because they were the 'enemy”?). I don’t think these people are 'deniers", myself. Mentioing there were other victims is important, I think.
Some reasonable historians do doubt the numbers- and since those numbers are estimates, some degree of doubt isn’t unreasonable. Maybe it was “only” 5 Million. I don’t see the real difference, myself.
Others- less “reasonable” doubt that there was a concerted nation-wide program to purposely kill the Jews. They claim that the few proven instances were “rogue” Nazis, and the rest died worked & starved to death in work camps., AND that the numbers have been exaggerated. :dubious:
What I don’t get is, since most deniers are neo-Nazi types, would they be GLAD about the Holocaust? Why deny it? When I first heard the term “Holocaust denier”, I thought they were people who were just so upset by the idea that they refused to believe it.
Actually there was. It’s certainly true that euphemisms were often used (“deported to the East”), but the Operational Situation Reports of the Einsatzgruppen are sometimes extremely blunt:
Table B-1 of Hilberg’s The Destruction of the European Jews (Holmes and Meier, 1985, volume III, p1219) breaks his estimate of a 5.1 million total down by cause of death as follows:
[ul]800,000 by ghettoization and general privation.[/ul]
[ul]1.3 million by open-air shooting.[/ul]
[ul]2.7 million in death camps, of which 1 million were in Auschwitz.[/ul]
[ul]300,000 in concentration camps, including Bergen-Belsen, Dachau etc.[/ul]
Not all of those killed in Auschwitz died in the gas chambers, but the overwhelming majority of those killed in the other death camps did so within hours of getting off the trains and without being recorded as individuals. Even completely excluding the Auschwitz dead, that’s at least 3 million out of his 5.1 million total who were directly executed rather than being worked or straved to death.
Hilberg is not the last word on the statistics, but nobody has seriously disputed this overall pattern.
They are, in private. In public, they want to rehabilitate the image of the Führer and Nazism so that it can once again compete on an even footing with other political philosophies.
One thing I think is a good thing in Germany nowadays: every school child must take a field trip at some point to a concentration camp to learn about the holocaust.
Having stood in a gas chamber at Dachau (where they were rarely used…it was the training camp, not a death camp), I can tell you that it is the creepiest thing on the planet. I can’t even imagine what Auschwitz must feel like. For revisionists who want to say the chamber was used for disinfecting clothes, I say that it’s an awful big coincidence that the chamber was disguised as a group shower, and when you open the door on the opposite side, you greet several human sized cremation ovens. Interesting layout for a laundry :rolleyes:
Everyone should try and visit a concentration camp at some point in their life. It’s not exactly a fun trip, but it certainly stays with you.
I think that the best summary of holocaust denial can be found at the Institute for Historical Review website. Sorry, I don’t know the URL. David Irving, the most famous proponent of this view was jailed for promoting this viewpoint. You see that it is not a very popular viewpoint. Most people don’t look at his arguments, and they like to label everybody that even questions the Holocaust, or tries to take a scholarly look at the evidence to see if it really did exist, as an anti-semite.
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The Nizkor Project is the best internet resource regarding the Holocaust and its denial.
It’s worth noting a few lesser-known facts. A “concentration camp” was largely a detention or slave labour camp, where many died in atrocious conditions but few died from systematic, mechanised extermination. There were only six death camps, dedicated to such. All were in Poland, out of sight of the German public who were not aware of their existence. Outside the Nazi top brass, many people largely supported the oppression of Jews, gypsies and other untermensch, but would have found their outright extermination abhorrent.
For this reason, the direct evidence of the megadeath occurring in their name was carefully hidden. We don’t find documents for eg. every trainload authorising extermination - instead we have to make inferences from documents which specify trainloads which are to be spared extermination.
A good example of some key direct evidence centers on the Auschwitz-Birkenau furnaces supplied by Topf & Sons. The first crematoria could incinerate a few tens of bodies per day, a hundred or so maximum - surely all that your average concentration camp would ever need even in dire conditions?
But no. More and more crematoria were built, having a staggering capacity: Twelve thousand per day. There is simply no explanation for this beyond systematic extermination of millions fo people over the course of just three years.
I think the Korher Report, a Nazi Document tracing the progress the Final Solution had made through the first quarter of 1943 is extremely damning (so did Nuremburg Prosecution that used it as evidence) At his Trial Eichmann testified that it was believed by the Nazi’s to be accurate and was the main source he used used in planning the ensuing years.
It says 2,454,000 had been killed by the Eisantzgruppen or in extermination camps by the end of 1942. The report caveats this as a significant undercount, since it specifically excludes those who died of disease or starvation in Ghettos and labor camps
This number pre-ceedes the liquidation of the Polish ghettos and before Auschwitz was fully operational.
There are no serious and respected historians that deny the basic facts of the attempt to exterminate Jews. The existence of the Holocaust is, however, a continuing source of guilt and a huge impediment to a major revival of anti-Semitism, so naturally there are creepy figures skulking around the fringes hoping to cast doubts here and there. As long as we have respect for history, they’ll get nowhere and hopefully the European “hate crime” laws can be phased out.
Where we have a good opportunity to squelch Holocaust denial right now is in the case of the Armenian genocide. Turkey has a chance to start addressing the past and there’s a good way to apply pressure (approving or denying EU membership). From a recent N.Y. Times editorial:
*"Granted, genocide is a difficult crime for any nation to acknowledge. But it is absurd to treat any reference to the issue within Turkey as a crime and to scream “lie!” every time someone mentions genocide. By the same token, we do not see the point of the French law to ban genocide denial. Historical truths must be established through dispassionate research and debate, not legislation, even if some of those who question the evidence do so for insidious motives.
But the Turkish government considers even discussion of the issue to be a grave national insult, and reacts to it with hysteria. Five journalists who criticized a court’s decision to shut down an Istanbul conference on the massacre of Armenians were arrested for insulting the courts. Charges against four were subsequently dropped, but a fifth remains on trial.
The preponderance of serious scholarship outside Turkey accepts that more than a million Armenians perished between 1914 and 1923 in a regime-sponsored campaign. Turkey’s continued refusal to countenance even a discussion of the issue stands as a major obstacle to restoring relations with neighboring Armenia and to claiming Turkey’s rightful place in Europe and the West. It is time for the Turks to realize that the greater danger to them is denying history."*