My Dad visited a concentration camp in Poland in the 70s. There are only two slides, one of the entrance with the slogan work makes you free (can’t remember the German) and one of a crematorium, both quite chilling. He also picked up a carved knife (from a souvenir shop of all things near by) made by a former inmate who had put an inscription of his serial number on the knife.
But that’s an aside. I wondered myself, with reference to the OP, if there were any records (polls or census) taken before the war with huge gaps afterwards where the millions of dead prisoners would fit. It seemed that the war would produce such upheavals of populations and destruction anyway that it might be a hard way to track down deaths.
In about 1990, I watched a fair amount of public access television. At the time (in central Illinois), there were several fringe guys that had their Holocaust shows. As near as I can tell, they break into two groups.
On one show, two short skinny redneck dipsticks sit facing each other wearing matching Reichsfurer uniforms and talk about how there is nothing that can’t be done once the white man puts his mind to it. To them, the Germans couldn’t have done the Holocaust because there are still Jews in the world. This is the true nut fringe. I doubt anyone takes them seriously. For Christ sakes there are two Reichsfurers on one show.
The next type is a bit more insidious and well funded. In another show, a guy takes a film crew to Poland. He documents the remnants of the major death camps. He shows how the ones not destroyed by the Germans have been destroyed by the Soviets. The buildings still standing are largely recreations. In this take, the Jews did die in large numbers but not in gas chambers. They died like any number of others in Europe at the time died. Soviet POWs in German care had notoriously high death rates. He paints it as a matter of want and neglect not mass murder. He goes on to explain that the gas chambers, experiments, soap making etc are all fabrications of the Soviets to make the German mass killing look way worse than their own mass killing.
The production value is fairly high and looks reasonable. I can see how it could be believeable the same way all the alien autopsy and Kenedy consiracy shows look reasonable. There will be a certain number of people that would buy it.
If it weren’t such a gruesome subject, the deniers would make me laugh. To put it at its most stark, if the Holocaust didn’t happen, then where did they all go? Where are the millions of Jewish people who used to live in Germany and France, and elsewhere?
When I did my Junior Year Abroad program in Germany, the Jewish members of our group were advised that the nearest congregation, should they wish to participate, was in a city two hundred miles away.
That’s what I wondered, wouldn’t there be empty homes, bank accounts, something to show that people lived there before. It can’t be that easy to wipe out so many people without trace.
One of the things they object to is the way that the survivors of the Holocaust and their decendants have, er, “benefitted” from the aftermath. They claim that the Jews exaggerated the extent and nature of their sufferings, and as a result the nation of Israel was artifically created in order to assauge European guilt. They will also claim that Israel and the Jews in general have made shameless political capital from the Holocaust ever since, as anyone who has a problem with Jews is effectively neutralized by being labeled a Nazi.
So, again, Holocaust denyers are generally those with an axe to grind. They feel that if they can someone minimize the mindnumbing scale of the atrocities committed, it will somehow make their ultimate goal of checking Zionist power more tenable.
Good point. Michael Shermer addresses this as well in his book Why People Believe Wierd Things. It’s a good way to address the issue of Holocaust denial.
Not only is it a devastating, fact-based, well documented skewering of Holocaust denial, it’s an entertaining read. I give it the highest possible recommendation. In fact, if you don’t want to shell out for it, let me know and I’ll mail you my copy.
But that’s the thing - Holocaust deniers do not deny a single Jewish death from the period 1936-1945. Their denial is not denying that a lot of Jews died during that time period. Their denial is stating that there was no organized campaign of extermination of the Jewish people.
“Yeah, sure,” they say, “lots of Jews died in camps during that time period. But guess what? Even the POW camps that were run by Americans saw massive outbreak of disease and such levels of malnutrition that Ike tried to reclassify German POWs under a different status so that we wouldn’t be in violation of the Geneva convention. So, if the prosperous, un-bombed Americans can’t get their act together enough to inter POWs and enemies, how can anyone be surprised that the camps run by the Germans saw massive death? Disease and malnutrition killed 6 million Jews, not Zyklon B.”
There are no documents signed by Hitler or any of his high ranking party members directly authorizing any sort of extermination; therefore, argue the deniers, there was no organized campaign. Jews being rounded up and shot were just unrelated incidents of over-zealousness on the part of individual units. Zyklon B doesn’t function as a poision to humans, or doesn’t work like historians say it should, or certain funnel holes left in the ground were too small to truly be part of an incinerator, or any other little detail gets disproven to show that there was no campaign of “extermination”; the Jews were rounded up, and then died because Germany couldn’t afford to feed and care for both its citizens and its impounded Jews.
Of course, even with all of that, there is still all of the eyewitness testimony. But that, as Kizarvexius explained, is hand-waved away. Survivors were encouraged to weave this tale of systemic extermination by their governments or religions (Soviets wishing to prove that fascsism was more evil than Communism; Americans following their Jewish masters; Jews willing to say anything if it would lead to a free Israel), and so all eye-witness testimony is inherently suspect. Add in to that the inconsistencies that all eye-witness accounts have - especially when recounting events of ten or twenty years prior - and the deniers have a field day. How can you believe the eye-witnesses, they say, when they can’t even agree on what color uniforms the guards at Auschwitz wore?
Of course, this level of denial isn’t even close to reasonable. It’s not even the level of “there are standard human flaws in the investigation, so there are holes and mistakes in it” that has led to massive conspiracy theories on the Kennedy assassination. It’s the level of “No one was standing behind Oswald, watching him pull the trigger while he stated that he was acting completely alone” level of doubt-raising.
I don’t know about this one; several of the most prominent Holocaust deniers and denier organizations have tried to minimize the number of deaths. I’ve seen numbers from 350,000 to 1.5 million thrown out there. They know that the very phrase “six million Jews” is such a buzzword, I think, that they like to try and undermine it.
I’m not sure this is so. I think I’d find it easy to prove that a nuclear bomb didn’t drop on my street last night, and that Elvis Presley didn’t win the last Presidential Election. I think this assertion is derived from the old logician claim that ‘you can’t prove a negative’. However, and I’m not trying to nitpick, you do have to be very careful and precise about mounting this particular form of argument, for fear of unwittingly handing ammunition to the Deniers. You can sometimes ‘prove a negative’ in the evidential or empirical sense. It is only in certain kinds of logic arugments that to try and ‘prove a negative’ is either impossible or makes little sense.
I’m lucky enough to know Michael Shermer and I can only endorse what others have said here: his writings on this subject are well worth anyone’s time and study. He not only makes the best case that I personally have ever come across for the historical realisty of the Holocaust, but he also writes with great insight about how the phenomenon of revisionism (and related phenomena) can arise, and the thiking and motivation behind it.
I haven’t yet visited one of the concentration camps or death camps, but I would like to, particularly Auschwitz. I’m sure I’d find it very moving, as I did when I visited the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park in February (no, I don’t spend all my travel time visiting such places… ). If any Doper has good information to share about going to Auschwitz, I’d be delighted to hear from them.
And they’re the same people who spraypaint “Six Million More” on synagogues every so often. Or if not them directly, then their followers. I’m sure no leader will ever be directly tied to such a brazen act.
The whole movement is completely two-faced. In public, they try to be ‘Respected Historians’ who present an ‘Alternate View’ of history. They present a convincing sham, like the recording that convinces you it’s a real person until the tape begins to loop. They’ve been on a tape loop for decades, and nobody can stop them.
In private, they glory in how many Jews died and how easy it will be to recruit new soldiers for the Race War that has been imminent since the 1960s. (“Segregation now, segregation for the next fifteen minutes!”) Their followers might be swayed by the production values, but it’s easy to convince people when you tell them what they know to be the right answers. Extremist movements always trade in losers. Losers never blame themselves.