Thanks for the Bent cite, Beagle. I guess I stand at least partially corrected on the movie thing, but I think it’s the exception that proves the rule.
Thanks, Valgard, that’s even more than i would have guessed. 
For those interested, there are lots of sources available on the Roma Holocaust. Here is a link to some:
As with all arguments ad Hitlerim, arguments about the death camps become shrill and politicized almost immediately. Jews and those who sympathize with them have pointed to the death camps as a seminal point in Jewish history, as an indictment of Christendom’s indifference, and as justification for support of the Jewish state. So, the Jewish suffering is discussed often not simply as a historical tragedy but also as support for a particular political or social issue. “The six million” has indeed become a shibboleth for Jews not only in a personal sense but as support for ongoing activism on behalf of the Jewish people’s survival – whether through conservative/Orthodox warnings on the (perceived) dangers of intermarriage decimating the race, or through support for Zion, or through efforts to battle the perceived anti-Semitism in culture and institutions.
Mourning the dead is an issue on which nobody loses. Intermarriage or Zionism or pointing to the possible racism of past or present generations aren’t, though, and when “The Six Million” are invoked in these debates, the other side may be prone to attack the shibboleth (once they realize that no one put turnstiles on the death camps and the number is inherently an estimate), rather than the underlying issue – even though I can’t see that the respective rights of, say, Israeli Jews and Palestinians would or should turn on whether it’s discovered that 6 million, vs. 7 million, vs. 4 or 5 million, died 50 years ago.
The other invidious aspect/outcome of emphasizing any particular number is that it invites a sort of arms race of victimology. The Turks and Armenians will never get over arguing about how many Armenians were killed – as if it’s okay to organize a relatively small genocide. The Irish have managed to get the potato famine included in at least one state “genocide” curriculum – I don’t know how this advances the ball for them. I suppose the Christians could argue that Hitler killed 20 million or more Christians, so they deserve even more sympathy than anyone else. Then you could (and do) end up with endless arguments about which kinds of deaths are “more deplorable” or which “qualify” as genocide. E.g., most of the deaths in the death camps probably weren’t executions per se. The bulk likely came from disease and exposure and starvation – which were endemic across wartime Europe and killed a large portion of the tens of millions who died. So which is “worse?” Or do we mourn those in the gas chambers more than those in the camp who starved? Does someone who starved in a ghetto “count” as a genocide victim? Whose death “counts” more, a starved concentration camp inmate or a starved Russian POW? Is it “worse” to die from genocidal aims than from merely military aims (but what about the “sub-human” Slavic victims of the military, whom Hitler probably would have targeted for genocide as well if he’d had the time?)? Is the death of a non-combatant inherently more evil than the death of a combatant (but what if the combatant is a 15 year old conscript forced into battle with machine guns at his back?)?
I guess the point is that death in war is pretty bad no matter what, and it would be nice (though I don’t think it’s going to happen in our tribal society) if people could deplore all such deaths, however many they may be, and all the ideologies that lead to them without trying to elevate the importance of “their” deaths or denigrate or diminish the numbers or importance of the deaths of the “other.”
Is this actually responsive to anything said here, or just a kind of generalized comment?
I don’t see anyone in this thread trying to elevate the importance of “their” deaths.
Moreover, I quite fail to see anyone using the holocaust as a justification for any particular Zionist or Jewish agenda.
Methinks you doth protest too much. Save this argument until the “crime” has been committed. Or cannot one have a discussion about the topic of holocaust denial without the comment, “the Jews are milking it for their own advantage” being thrown in gratuitously?
As for the “Jews and those who sympathize with them” comment - does this imply that you do not? I myself “sympathize” with people of any ethnicity or religion.
I have a cat named Gypsy. Does that count?
I met a Holocaust survivor once, a friend of my aunt’s. REALLY nice guy, who actually made jokes about it. (My aunt commented on pictures of the bunks-“no pillows?” His response, “Patti, what the hell, this wasn’t the Holiday Inn!”) I only met him once, but he was just so gracious, so kind and considerate. He’d been through hell, but he was able to survive. It’s amazing.
Malthus: I’ve clashed horns with Huerta88 before. He was kind enough to use a German written eugenics paper (written post Hitler, I must say) as a cite to prove the criminality of Roma.
Ummm . . . no one said anything about the Jews milking it for their own advantage. My strong supposition is that Jews would trade whatever political capital the deaths are perceived as conferring in exchange for not having had their fellows die.
My response was responsive to the speculation about what could motivate the “revisionist” underground (including Malthus’s apt “I have never really understood holocaust deniers. Often, the people doing the denying are the very ones who sympathize with Nazi goals - why deny what they evidently admire?”
The Holocaust does have political significance. The establishment and support of Israel would not, I submit, have unfolded on the timetable they did in its absence – and most Americans probably associate their broad support for Israel with the need to redress/compensate the Jewish suffering. To take one very specific example of a policy rooted directly in the war, Israel’s religion-based immigration law (the Law Of Return) is founded at least in substantial part on the goal of assuring that Jewish refugees would, as did not always happen in the war, have some place to go.
My comment about the arms race actually referred not to anyone in this thread or to the Jewish population, but mainly to those who seem to have Holocaust Envy (the Armenian and Irish situations do come to mind) and end up vying with the Jews for rival victim status.
“The Jews and those who sympathize with them” does as it turns out include me (but not, obviously, the whole world) – I used the construction in trying to figure out, from the outside, how the number of victims became a political football between the Jews and their allies (which ought to but does not include all Christians, as I think St. Paul noted that “We are all spiritual Jews” [no cite at hand]), and those who don’t sympathize.
And, I’m glad to hear your sympathies are as catholic (so to speak) as they are.
I don’t know if there are any holocaust deniers who don’t sympathize with the nazis and just can’t accept the truth because it’s so horrible.
I do know that I’ve never met one.
I only met and read postings of those
who “just ask questions nobody dares to ask”
who “don’t deny that the nazis were bad, but the Sovjets were even worse and the British bombed Dresden and the Americans killed the Indians…”
who “just want to say that the Nazis surely knew how to make the streets save”
who “know who really rules this planet, the US and the world-economy, protecting Israel to commit antrocities”
who “wonder if Hitler wasn’t right about the Jews when you see what they do to the Palestinians”
They are so eager to especially deny the existence of the gas chambers, claiming that the inmates died of typhus or other diseases, because without the gas chambers, without the industrialized murder of the jews, they think Hitler could be seen as just another dictator, cruel though, but not that bad.
Unfortunatly, he was.
Perhaps decent, democratic holocaust deniers do exist. Perhaps unicorns do, too.
Kalimero
Not in those words assuredly. But that is a quite reasonable extrapolation from this:
“So, the Jewish suffering is discussed often not simply as a historical tragedy but also as support for a particular political or social issue. “The six million” has indeed become a shibboleth for Jews not only in a personal sense but as support for ongoing activism on behalf of the Jewish people’s survival – whether through conservative/Orthodox warnings on the (perceived) dangers of intermarriage decimating the race, or through support for Zion, or through efforts to battle the perceived anti-Semitism in culture and institutions.”
– a reasonable enough statement in and of itself, except for one thing - it has no bearing on the issues under discussion at all, as far as I can tell.
So, is your thesis then that “holocaust deniers” are not Nazi sympathizers at all - but instead are simply unhappy at the Jewish ‘milking of the holocaust for their own advantage’ (using my term?) and so invent a fake history to foil them?
I find this very, very difficult to believe. Why go through the elaborate and self-defeating effort of denying history, when a simple “that shit happened, it doesn’t entitle you to any special treatment, get over it” statement would suffice?
Far more significant than any sympathies displayed by anyone was the displacement of millions of European Jews, who flooded to Israel on their own - followed, later, by millions from the Islamic world.
But so what? What does the creation of Israel have to do with the desire to deny the holocaust happened? I still don’t get it. If one dislikes the state of Israel, surely one does not need to invent a fake history to justify that dislike - or does one?
Again, irrelevant. I agree that terms like “genocide” get used inappropriately, and that people seek sympathy for their cause - but what does this have to do with holocaust denial?
Well, it sure didn’t sound like it.
Anyway, the problem I have with this line of argument is that it has the sound of responding to arguments made elsewhere by other people - not here and now.
I for one simply do not believe that the basis for holocaust denial is anger at the “superior victim status” and all the goodies this supposedly provides the Jews and Israel. If that is the argument, it seems rather inadequate. A quick perusal of internet sites linked to revisionsism (I will not post links) discloses rather more in the way of sympathy for old-style Nazi theories of race than any anger over unfair victim status exploitation.
This is incongruous with every reputable source I’ve ever heard on the subject. Rudolf Hoss stated at the Nuremburg trials that during his period as Commandant of Auschwitz around 2.5 million were executed by gassing and burning, and another half million died of disease and starvation.
pravnik, it is true that the majority of Jews murdered in the Holocaust were not gassed, though - a huge, huge number of people were killed in the field shortly after the Wehrmacht conquered their countries, and a great many were summarily executed or died of typhus/malnutrition/TB/what have you in labour and internment camps of lesser note than the famous death camps. A common tactic, especially on the Eastern Front, was to herd women and children into barns and then burn the bard down. It wasted fewer bullets, you see, because you only had to shoot the ones who ran out. Two hundred murders for the price of ten. Or sometimes they just shot them by the hundreds. (In addition, prisoners of war were starved to death by the millions in camps you’ve probably never heard of - at least two million POWs were murdered in addition to the Holocaust victims.) Those who made it to Dachau and Auschwitz actually lived longer than most of the victims - the majority didn’t live long enough to get to a death camp.
So I think there is some confusion here; it IS true that most Jews who died in the Holocaust were not executed in the death camps. However, many, many more were executed in places OTHER than the death camps.
RickJay:
But Huerta88 said that "most of the deaths in the death camps probably weren’t executions per se" And that’s not true, as pravnik has already said.
Kalimero
I’ll buy that, RickJay, but if I understand Huerta88 correctly he’s saying that within the death camps more died of starvation and disease than did by execution. That doesn’t gibe with what has always been my understanding-that the majority of men, women and children sent to the death camps like Auschwitz were executed, most immediately after arrival.
Or, on preview, what Kalimaro said.
Oops. Kalimero, even.
My “probably” was probably an indication I should have researched it beyond drawing on my general recollection of rampant disease/inanition deaths during the war, and I’ll take pravnik’s and RickJay’s thoughts with thanks. No one knows exactly what the relative numbers were and my feeling, again, is that given lots of people ended up dead it’s a pretty bad no matter how you slice it.
I’ve been thinking about Matlhus’s contention that my speculation on the roots of revisionism was missing the mark. Maybe what I was trying to say was that some of the “revisionist” impulse comes from Europeans or Christians feeling that endorsing “pro Holocaust” views (awkward phrasing – I mean endorsing the sympathetic view that Jews did certainly did suffer/die in millions) inevitably requires deploring (or actively attacking) the European/Christian milieu in which this happened. This is a variant on “they can’t bear to think it’s true because it’s so awful” – “they can’t bear to think it’s true because it implicates or seems to implicate them/their ancestors/their fellow kinsmen.” I would expect this kind of defensive denial to be elicited especially by the more uncompromising “Holocaust advocates” (Goldhagen, etc.) who feel the Germans as a whole, or the Church, were pretty much all complicit in murder of the Jews.
Of course, the “anti-deniers” are also somewhat unreasonable. Even saying it “wasn’t six million, it was more like 5 million”, or “more non-Jews died, than Jews” (true if you count the Russians & such, or at least- MAYBE true, the estimates are so poor) or “they didn’t really make soap or lampshades out of them”- makes some turn on you with hatred & distain- you get labeled as “anti-semitic” and a “nazi”.
There are SOME commonly held beliefs about the Holocaust that seem to be doubtful (note the “soap” story above)- and of course the figures have to be estimates (but they aren’t off by THAT much, that is certain). But- the Holocaust happened. Anyone who denies the basic fact that millions of Jews, Gays, Romani, Russians & etc died in those camps IS a “nazi”… or an idiot.
Basically, yes, though there are complicated sensitivities involved. And different sites involve different issues. For example, while Auschwitz I is closely managed and effectively a complex of museum buildings, the ruins of Auschwitz II (Birkenau) are partially managed, but otherwise rotting away. I don’t think anything remains from Auschwitz III. Plasnow (the camp in Schindler’s List) on the outskirts of Krakow is almost entirely obliterated. It was systematically destoyed by the Nazis at the end of the war. Apart from the villa, nothing else is standing and there are really only fragments of brickwork and the like in the long grass. There are a handful of monuments and I presume the area is protected as an historic site, but that’s about it and virtually none of the tourists in town visit the place.
There are those who believe that all the sites should be left to decay in much this way. I can’t say I disagree: personally, I found the ruins of Birkenau far more devastating as a visitor than the slightly sanitised exhibition in Auschwitz I. But is that a valid measure, the emotional response the places register in visitors ? I don’t know.
In that particular case, the postwar history and the decisions taken are discussed by Deborah Dwork and Robert Jan van Pelt in the last chapter of their Auschwitz: 1270 to the Present (Norton, 1996). There was also an excellent long New Yorker article on the issues involved in preserving the site about 10 years ago, but I don’t have the exact reference. (If anybody does, please post it.)
Aside from the websites others have mentioned, there are, of course, many good books on the subject. In fact, your biggest problem is that there are so many of them.
There are a number of standard, widely respected overviews and those would be one place to start. These are also the sort of books that summarise a lot of the known facts and so are good general references on the subject. The obvious three are possibly Raul Hilberg’s multi-volume The Destruction of the European Jews (there’s a single volume abridgement, which might be handier), Lucy Davidowicz’s The War Against the Jews, 1933-1945 and Martin Gilbert’s The Holocaust. Unfortunately, all focus on the Jews to the exclusion of the other persecuted groups. However, I can’t think of any other work on that sort of scale that doesn’t have this weakness. Dwork and Jan van Pelt have recently published an overview, but I’ve neither read it nor do I have much feel for how it’s been received. Gilbert’s also produced an Atlas of the Holocaust, which goes into detail about who was killed, where and when and which is a good general reference on the subject. None of these works is without minor errors in matters of detail, but they’re all reliable.
Beyond that, things get a little more complicated. The subject is of intense interest to historians and hence much of their writing on it are contributions to the multiple debates that they have around it. As a rule, the standard of scholarship in the field strikes me, as an outsider, as extremely high. Thus pretty much any book on the subject by an academic historian can be relied upon to get its facts accurate. The thing to be wary of is that it’s probably a contribution to some ongoing debate. Why did it happen ? Was it planned or opportunistic ? What were the motivations of the perpetrators ? Etc., etc. Such debates are rarely about the facts - in this instance, historians can agree about those. Instead the facts are used to support or undermine particular explanations. Thus the problem for the non-historian is to understand that any particular book is probably describing only part of a huge picture. For instance, someone interested in the role of doctors in the Holocaust will probably write at length about T4 and the euthenasia programme as a precusor to the death camps. That’s a big subject in itself. Hence they’re unlikely to talk about the Einsatzgruppen shootings in Russia. Someone else, with a different perspective, may choose to write about the latter and underplay the former. Neither need be wrong, they’re just focussed on a relatively narrow part of the subject. Both are reliable, but if you read only one, your understanding is incomplete.
Incidentally, and it’s a fairly narrow issue in itself, Roseman’s The Villa, the Lake, the Meeting (Allen Lane, 2002) seemed to me an excellent up-to-date summary of the debates surrounding Wannsee and the commitment to the Final Solution.
I think there’s a place for both, Bonzer. One is a place of learning and the other is a place for feeling. I went with my partner, who knew next to nothing about the Holocaust. He was grateful for the chance to learn about lots of different aspects of Auschwitz, and concentration camps in general. I agree that Birkenau was particularly moving, and am happy it’s been semi-preserved.
Thanks for the many replies about this topic. Shermer mentions the fact that the SS units that ran the death camps were very meticulous about keeping records. yet, most of the hard copy records were destroyed. I wouldimagine that any halfway intelligent SS official would have known by about 1943, that Germany was going to lose the war. Did this cause the SS to begin the destruction of the records? Also, I read that some of these camps were attached to factories (like the factory described in “SCHINDLER’s LIST”-presumably the German industrialists left records detailing the use of slave labor-are these in existence today?