Holocaust Questions

General Questions
#1

Recently I’ve been reading the book “Night” by Elie Wiesel in my lit class. Coincidentally, I also recently read a post by some troll on Usenet. The troll asserts many things about the historocity of “Night” (read: Holocaust denier), and the vast majority of the troll’s assertions are laughingly false and asnine. However, a few of them raised questions. The questions themselves pertain to the Holocaust itself than to the disgusting denial movement. So, here they are:

-In “Night” Wiesel mentions seeing the furnace at Auschwitz belching forth flame. How does flame belch from chimneys? Were they blast furnaces, or was this passage symbolic?

-Wiesel implies that some people were thrown into the furnaces alive. How often did this happen at Auschwitz?

-Wiesel says that babies were thrown into the furnace alive. Again, how often did this happen?

-What did they do to Auschwitz right before the Death March? Wiesel says that they were forced to clean their buildings, but I recall hearing that the Germans burned the entire camp down. Which happened, or did both actually occur?

#2

It’s called evil, kid.

Pix of Auschwitz furnaces.
http://www.fmv.ulg.ac.be/schmitz/Holocaust/furnace.html

Discussion of Auschwitz furnaces.
http://www.nizkor.org/ftp.cgi/camps/auschwitz/crematoria/furnaces-cold-air

Annnnd…that’s about as far as I personally feel like going with this evil stuff, looking at Google hits for “Auschwitz furnaces”. :frowning: Feel free to borrow my search engine.

www.google.com

#3

You might go the the library and get the book Rise And Fall Of The Third Reich by William L. Shirer. This is a well researched and documented account. There is a section (starting page 967 in my book) in it about the activities of the various extermination and other concentration camps of that period.

#4

Just be wary of Holocaust revisionists. They will tell you it never happened.
Which is total bullshit.

#5

Does Wiesel talk about seeing the flames from a location in the barracks? Jewish prisoners were forced to attend to the disposal of the bodies. If Wiesel was ever a part of one of the work parties, he’d have seen the flames from the doors being opened. On the other hand, I worked at a place that had an incinerator (back before clean air standards were improved) and I know that with any lax standards regarding maintenance and fire levels, you can, indeed, get flaming debris rising up the stacks. (It would not be a constant flame in the manner of an oil refinery burn-off stack, but it could be considered “flaming.”)

As to throwing people (adult or infant) into the flames, alive: it certainly would not have been standard practice (as that would have slowed down the assembly-line efficiency for which the Nazis were striving), but one or two incidents of spontaneous cruelty in that manner would probably haunt a person for a very long time.

#6

I don’t think the OP could have said it better himself.