# I don't understand holocaust denial **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [March 11, 2017, 11:15pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-dont-understand-holocaust-denial/781963 "2017-03-11T23:15:19Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 14
**Author:** ![chaika](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/chaika/32/405_2.png) [@chaika](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/chaika)\ **Post date:** [March 25, 2017, 5:21pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-dont-understand-holocaust-denial/781963/261 "2017-03-25T17:21:55Z")
> [@Chen019](#): > > Aside from disease in the camps, another major factor was the actions of the Einsatzgruppen and their local allies. These forces operated behind German lines after Operation Barbarossa **to suppress local resistance**. Large numbers were killed. [Bolding mine.] Statements like this one are infuriating, couching the murders of millions of innocent civilians in this bland reasonable tone, as though the Einsatzgruppen were behaving in an entirely understandable fashion. They were only trying “to suppress local resistance,” so goodness me, how could anyone possible object? An invading army simply must destroy that pesky resistance, mustn’t it? At least, that is how I read the subtext. But even beyond that question of tone, the idea that the Einsaztzgruppen and local collaborators murdered only members of partisan groups is flatly contradicted by the historical record. They may have initially been created to kill political opponents but within a very short period of time they began killing Jews simply because they were Jewish. Here is a story that may put a human face on things. I don’t expect to change Chen019’s mind, as his/her views seem firmly entrenched. And the OP has disappeared. But I’d like to add this story to the thread anyway. When the Nazis invaded the USSR, some of my husband’s relatives lived in Ukraine. They were concerned that their eldest daughter, then a teenager, would be in danger because she belonged to the Komsomol (the Communist youth organization), so they sent her far away to stay with friends. They were completely naive about the Nazis’ actual intentions. The Nazis didn’t care that no one else in the family belonged to the Communist Party or affiliated organizations. They were Jewish and that was all that mattered. They were all slaughtered. The only member of the family to survive was the eldest daughter. So no. The Einsatzgruppen were not primarily concerned with eliminating “local resistance.” They slaughtered men and women, infants and children and the elderly. They probably would have murdered even more people if the Nazis hadn’t decided that mass shootings were an inefficient method of destroying the Jewish population and the extermination camps became the main focus for this lethal goal. ---
**Author:** ![iiandyiiii](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/iiandyiiii/32/7924_2.png) [@iiandyiiii](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/iiandyiiii)\ **Post date:** [March 25, 2017, 5:35pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-dont-understand-holocaust-denial/781963/262 "2017-03-25T17:35:46Z")
**Chen019** is still ignoring specific pieces of evidence like [this report](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J%C3%A4ger_Report) in which Commander SS-Standartenführer Karl Jäger documented over 100,000 Jews and others murdered in Lithuania by Einsatzkommando III with date, location, and number of men, women and children killed, writing “I can state today that the goal of solving the Jewish problem in Lithuania has been reached by Einsatzkommando 3. There are no more Jews in Lithuania, apart from working Jews and their families.” ---
**Author:** ![Trinopus](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/2bfe46/32.png) [@Trinopus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Trinopus)\ **Post date:** [March 25, 2017, 5:39pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-dont-understand-holocaust-denial/781963/263 "2017-03-25T17:39:23Z")
> [@chaika](#): > > . . . So no. The Einsatzgruppen were not primarily concerned with eliminating “local resistance.” They slaughtered men and women, infants and children and the elderly. . . . Extremely valid and important point. In fact, if the invading forces had behaved decently toward the conquered people of Ukraine, they might have been able to stir up anti-Communist and anti-Russian sentiments. Instead, they stiffened the resistance, as the people saw the Nazis for the murderous thugs they actually were. There was nothing rational about the murder squads. They were a virulent symptom of the hellish disease of Nazism. ---
**Author:** ![Latro](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/a87d85/32.png) [@Latro](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Latro)\ **Post date:** [March 25, 2017, 7:11pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-dont-understand-holocaust-denial/781963/264 "2017-03-25T19:11:43Z")
> [@Trinopus](#): > > Extremely valid and important point. > > In fact, if the invading forces had behaved decently toward the conquered people of Ukraine, they might have been able to stir up anti-Communist and anti-Russian sentiments. Instead, they stiffened the resistance, as the people saw the Nazis for the murderous thugs they actually were. Uhm… They _did_ get loads of Ukrainian volunteers. A large part of the Ukrainian population was highly anti-semitic. Today they are still proud to have fought on the German side, against the Russians. Witness the sporting of flagrant Nazi symbols in today’s Ukraine. ---
**Author:** ![Trinopus](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/2bfe46/32.png) [@Trinopus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Trinopus)\ **Post date:** [March 25, 2017, 7:22pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-dont-understand-holocaust-denial/781963/265 "2017-03-25T19:22:39Z")
> [@Latro](#): > > Uhm… They _did_ get loads of Ukrainian volunteers. A large part of the Ukrainian population was highly anti-semitic. Today they are still proud to have fought on the German side, against the Russians. Witness the sporting of flagrant Nazi symbols in today’s Ukraine. They drove away far more others. Yes, there were some quislings. (Today’s retro-nazi regalia-freaks are not really relevant to 1941 sentiments.) ---
**Author:** ![Jackmannii](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/jackmannii/32/311_2.png) [@Jackmannii](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Jackmannii)\ **Post date:** [March 25, 2017, 7:26pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-dont-understand-holocaust-denial/781963/266 "2017-03-25T19:26:22Z")
> [@Latro](#): > > Uhm… They _did_ get loads of Ukrainian volunteers. A large part of the Ukrainian population was highly anti-semitic. Today they are still proud to have fought on the German side, against the Russians. Witness the sporting of flagrant Nazi symbols in today’s Ukraine. It was a mixed picture. Numerous Ukrainians did collaborate with the Nazis, partly due to hatred of Soviets for engineering famine in their land and because of rampant ethnic hatreds (not just against Jews, but also Roma, Poles etc.). On the other hand, there were armed Ukrainian resistance groups ([including Jewish partisans](https://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10005441)) who battled the Nazis. ---
**Author:** ![GIGObuster](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/gigobuster/32/421_2.png) [@GIGObuster](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/GIGObuster)\ **Post date:** [March 25, 2017, 7:34pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-dont-understand-holocaust-denial/781963/267 "2017-03-25T19:34:09Z")
> [@Chen019](#): > > The president of the British Joint Intelligence Committee, Victor Cavendish-Bentinck, on 27 August 1943, wrote that the reports were devoid of all basis in fact: > > And given what’s known today he was clearly correct in relation to the gas chamber claims. As there is no cite to see if he changed his mind after the evidence came later, it is clear that you are still relying on a red herring. What I have seen is that David Irving was a main proponent of that erroneous bit of information and mostly lied about the context. [http://holocaustcontroversies.blogspot.com/2008/06/another-denier-lie-victor-cavendish.html](http://holocaustcontroversies.blogspot.com/2008/06/another-denier-lie-victor-cavendish.html) > [@](#): > > This is key to Irving’s personal tragedy - his self-inflicted downfall as a historical researcher - because it shows that he was gambling with his personal reputation, not on the basis of his own primary research, but on the dirty diggings of someone working for a pro-Nazi. Irving thus “went for broke”, not just on Leuchter [Irving wrote a foreword for the Leuchter Report, published in April 1989, that repeated the Cavendish-Bentinck canard], but on a platform of pro-Nazi distortions. > > What was the distortion in this case? As Evans and Van Pelt make clear, Irving’s lie was to present a totally false paraphrase of Cavendish-Bentinck’s memo. At no point did Cavendish-Bentinck say that the murder of Jews in gas chambers was a lie. His memo referred purely to claims relating to the gassing of Poles, a fact which he emphasised by underlining the word ‘Polish’. He also made it clear that he regarded those claims as “untrustworthy” and unsupported by known evidence, but at no point did he state that they were fabricated by the British or known to be a lie [rather than simply unfounded]: > > > [@](#): > > > > In my opinion it is incorrect to describe Polish information regarding German atrocities as “trustworthy”. The Poles, and to a far greater extent the Jews, tend to exaggerate German atrocities in order to stoke us up. They seem to have succeeded. > > Mr. Allen and myself have both followed German atrocities quite closely. I do not believe that there is any evidence which would be accepted in a Law Court that Polish children have been killed on the spot by Germans when their parents were being deported to work in Germany, nor that Polish children have been sold to German settlers. As regards putting Poles to death in gas chambers, I do not believe there is any evidence that this has been done. There may have been stories to this effect, and we have played them up in P.W.E. rumours without believing that they had any foundation. At any rate there is far less evidence than exists for the mass murder of Polish officers by the Russians at Katyn. > > Moreover, Cavendish-Bentinck went on to state that: > > > [@](#): > > > > **On the other hand we do know that the Germans are out to destroy the Jews of any age unless they are fit for manual labour.** > > Cavendish-Bentinck therefore, far from expressing the view that the systematic extermination of Jews was a lie, stated unequivocally that systematic extermination of Jews unfit for labour was taking place. > > How have deniers responded to this exposure of Irving’s lie? Typically, not only do they perpetuate it, but they falsely present Irving’s paraphrase as a direct quotation of Cavendish-Bentinck’s minutes. For example, see K0nsl’s site here. > > Such flagrant dishonesty requires no further comment, just contempt. ---
**Author:** ![Latro](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/a87d85/32.png) [@Latro](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Latro)\ **Post date:** [March 25, 2017, 7:45pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-dont-understand-holocaust-denial/781963/268 "2017-03-25T19:45:38Z")
> [@Trinopus](#): > > Yes, there were some quislings. There were some 83 SchuMa battalions raised from Ukrainians, more than 80.000 joined the 14th SS division, 50.000 in the Ostlegionen and several Ostbattalione. That’s not just some Quislings. ---
**Author:** ![Dissonance](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/85f322/32.png) [@Dissonance](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dissonance)\ **Post date:** [March 25, 2017, 8:07pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-dont-understand-holocaust-denial/781963/269 "2017-03-25T20:07:37Z")
> [@Chen019](#): > > Aside from disease in the camps, another major factor was the actions of the Einsatzgruppen and their local allies. These forces operated behind German lines after Operation Barbarossa to suppress local resistance. Large numbers were killed. It’s almost like someone knew you were going to say this and preemptively called your bullshit on it 118 posts ago. > [@Dissonance](#): > > There’s that, and there’s also the problem that the Holocaust isn’t a taboo subject. **Chen019** wouldn’t be able to climb up on his cross and claim persecution while trying to deny that the Holocaust occurred were he to acknowledge either of these though. > > **I’d ask if he’d care to try to take a stab at explaining away the [Einsatzgruppen](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einsatzgruppen) and why whey murdered two million people, 1.3 million of them Jews in the wake of the invasion of the Soviet Union but I’m quite sure of how he’d try using the Institute of Historical Review playbook on the matter. That is to claim that the Einsatzgruppen was engaged in anti-partisan activities. \*\* They did, but 1) that was in the years after they engaged in mass murder by open air shootings of Jews, Romani, Communists and other ‘undesirables’ that was planned before Barbarossa began, 2) anti-partisan activities on the Eastern Front were scarcely distinguishable from mass murder anyway and 3) [On 8 July [1941], Heydrich announced that all Jews were to be regarded as partisans, and gave the order for all male Jews between the ages of 15 and 45 to be shot.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einsatzgruppen#Killings_in_the_Soviet_Union) It also doesn’t explain why Jewish males outside of that age group along with Jewish women and children were murdered by the Einsatzgruppen. \*\* I’m sure that he’d simply ignore the Jager report just as he has Himmler’s own words and for the same reason: there is no way to explain them away**. ---
**Author:** ![Peter\_Morris](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/peter_morris/32/359_2.png) [@Peter\_Morris](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Peter_Morris)\ **Post date:** [March 25, 2017, 8:39pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-dont-understand-holocaust-denial/781963/270 "2017-03-25T20:39:44Z")
> [@Dissonance](#): > > It’s almost like someone knew you were going to say this and preemptively called your bullshit on it 118 posts ago. Not that I’m agreeing with him, or defending him or anything, but isn’t he actually acknowledging their actions? ---
**Author:** ![Dissonance](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/85f322/32.png) [@Dissonance](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dissonance)\ **Post date:** [March 25, 2017, 11:17pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-dont-understand-holocaust-denial/781963/271 "2017-03-25T23:17:07Z")
> [@Peter\_Morris](#): > > Not that I’m agreeing with him, or defending him or anything, but isn’t he actually acknowledging their actions? Only in the same manner as he is acknowledging that the Holocaust occurred by saying some Jews died of typhus. As I said, the IHR playbook on explaining away the Einsatzgruppen is to say they were engaged in anti-partisan activities; in Chen’s word’s here “suppress local resistance”. Dragging out 2 million pre-selected ‘undesirable’ men, women, and children (1.3 million Jewish) from their homes and murdering them in open air shootings isn’t suppressing local resistance. That’s what the Einsatzgruppen did in the first year after Barbarossa. It was only in the following years that they were engaged in anything that could remotely be described as anti-partisan operations or ‘suppressing local resistance’ rather than blatant genocide or ethnic cleansing. ---
**Author:** ![Weisshund](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/ba8739/32.png) [@Weisshund](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Weisshund)\ **Post date:** [March 26, 2017, 8:51am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-dont-understand-holocaust-denial/781963/272 "2017-03-26T08:51:12Z")
@Chen019 You’re not going to answer me are you? I called you out on purposely and falsely manipulating facts by removing the parts you dont want to show because they make you a liar. What? nothing to say? ---
**Author:** ![tomndebb](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/b9e5f3/32.png) [@tomndebb](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/tomndebb)\ **Post date:** [March 26, 2017, 11:15am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-dont-understand-holocaust-denial/781963/273 "2017-03-26T11:15:51Z")
> [@Weisshund](#): > > @Chen019 > > You’re not going to answer me are you? > I called you out on purposely and falsely manipulating facts by removing the parts you dont want to show because they make you a liar. > > What? nothing to say? From[Rules for Great Debates and Elections at SDMB](http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=818217) > [@](#): > > \*\*5. Accusations of lying \*\*- It is against the rules to accuse another poster of lying or being a liar in the Great Debates or Elections fora. Questioning or disputing the accuracy of another poster’s statements–“I don’t think that’s right”, “That’s incorrect”, “You are mistaken”, or even “That’s not true”-- is what Great Debates is all about. However, questioning the intent of another poster in making an arguably false statement–e.g., “You are a liar”, “You are lying”, “That is a lie”, “That’s not true and you darned well know it isn’t true”–is crossing the line into attacking the other poster rather than attacking the other poster’s arguments, and will be considered a violation of the rules of the forum. In general, to be considered an accusation of lying a post must contain the following two elements: 1) deliberately saying something that the person knows is untrue, and 2) doing so with the intent to deceive. Do not continue to pursue that line of questioning. [/Moderating] ---
**Author:** ![Chen019](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/f19dbf/32.png) [@Chen019](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chen019)\ **Post date:** [March 29, 2017, 10:31am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-dont-understand-holocaust-denial/781963/274 "2017-03-29T10:31:22Z")
> [@tomndebb](#): > > So, Chen019’s “evidence” amounts to > [ul] > [li]an absence in a one year period to references in radio transmissions about a particular form of murder that the Nazis would not have been particularly eager to announce while it occurred[/li][li]an anonymous mid-war speculation about atrocities[/li][li]and a mid-war rejection of reports of atrocities as propaganda, produced at a time when it is already known that many members of the Allied leadership discounted all such reports, simply because they could not imagine that even the Nazis could behave in that fashion.[/li][/ul] > None of the claims are provided in actual context. > For example, why would the Nazis have been transmitting information about gassing by radio when they had perfectly functional telephone and telegraph lines? Since we have no context for the reports of disease and shootings in radio transmissions, we have no way to evaluate the significance of the absence of reference to gassings. > It has long been known that during the war, many Allied commanders simply could not imagine the reality of the extermination program and denied its existence even when presented with evidence. > > This is the sort of cherry-picked (when it is not invented) data that is held up as the refutation to mountains of evidence. > > The other method of denial that we have already seen in this thread involves making a claim, then repeating it when it is refuted as though the refutation never occurred. An example is to the claim of “wooden doors” on gas chambers when the doors so identified are not the doors from the actual execution chambers. Hey tomndebb, For a fuller outline of my views & why I consider the gas chamber claims to be war propaganda see my earlier posts. You say there is mountains of evidence, when clearly much of what has been claimed has been shown to be war propaganda with no basis in fact. You state above that Allied Commanders could not imagine what was going on even when presented with evidence. Do you mean when they were shown images of corpses or emaciated prisoners in camps like Dachau, Buchenwald, Berge-Belsen? The claims of extermination centres in German camps, eg: > [@](#): > > In Lueneburg, Germany, a Jewish physician, testifying at the trial of 45 men and women for war crimes at the Belsen and Oswiecim [Auschwitz] concentration camps, said that 80,000 Jews, representing the entire ghetto of Lodz, Poland, had been gassed or burned to death in one night at the Belsen camp. Or: > [@](#): > > “Everything had been provided for down to the smallest detail. In 1944, at Buchenwald, they had even lengthened a railway line so that the deportees might be led directly to the gas chamber. Certain [of the gas chambers] had a floor that tipped and immediately directed the bodies into the room with the crematory oven.” > > Nuremberg document 274-F (RF-301). IMT, Vol. 37, p. 148. Of course, the Allied skepticism clearly proved to be warranted. \*\*The extermination claims above, presented as fact at Nuremberg, turned out to be false. \*\* So we turn to the camps in Poland. Are the gas-chamber claims, that proved to be war-propaganda in relation to German camps, any more reliable in relation to camps in Poland? I mentioned above what the British Codebreakers found. British wartime intelligence was eavesdropping on the radio traffic as Auschwitz (and other camps) sent regular reports to the relevant government department in Berlin. These messages were either in plain text or a low-level encrypt and consisted consisted of daily reports on population [Bestand], arrivals [Zugänge], and departures [Abgänge] from the concentration camps. And, as noted above, the main cause of death at Auschwitz was typhus, with some references to shootings and hangings. On 28 January 1943, Bletchley Park even reported that the Oranienburg office issued an order to compile detailed statistics and to report the exact numbers of deceased inmates and new arrivals (Bletchley Park Summary Reports ZIP/OS6 of 28 January 1942). So yes, if there was a mass gassing programme, you might expect there to be some reference to it in these transmissions. Again, I’ve noted above that inmate records which contradict the suggestion that people who couldn’t work were immediately taken away and killed: I noted, for example, a report on the medical treatment of 3,138 Hungarian Jewish internees was drawn up on June 28, 1944, - when the ‘gas chambers’ were allegedly being operated at full capacity - establishes precisely the illnesses for which the persons concerned are to be treated: > [@](#): > > "Surgical cases 1426 > > Diarrhea 327 > > Constipation 253 > > Angina 79 > > Diabetes mell. 4 > > Weak heart > > 25 > > Scabies 62 > > Pneumonia 75 > > Flu . 136 > > Intertrig. [sore spots] 59,268 > > Other 449 > > Infectious diseases: > > Scarlet fever . 5 > > Mumps 16 > > Measles 5 > > Eryspel 5" > > Gosudarstvenny Arkhiv Rossiskoi Federatsii (GARF), Moscow, 7021-108-32, p. 76 In Auschwitz, every SS man had to sign a declaration reading word for word as follows: > [@](#): > > “I am aware that only the Führer possesses life and death decision-making powers over enemies of the State. I am not permitted to injure or kill any enemy of the State (inmate). Any killing of an inmate in a concentration camp requires the personal approval of the Reichsführer SS. I am aware that I will be severely called to account for any violation of this regulation.” > > GARF, 7021-107-11, p. 130. Kazimierz Smoleń, former Director of the Auschwitz-Museum, wrote an article on the punishment system at Auschwitz based on German documents, in which the various punishments provided for by the regulation are listed in order of severity: Warning with threat of punishment Additional work Temporary transfer to a punishment company Arrest Severe arrest with withdrawal of food Arrest in solitary confinement Beating (25 blows). SS men guilty of committing crimes against inmates, such as Karl Koch of Buchenwald and Hermann Florstedt of Majdanek - were executed. **Gas chamber & atrocity propaganda:** It’s interesting to see where this originated. The Resistance movement claimed in 1941 there were “electrical baths”, combat gases and a “pneumatic hammer” used to kill prisoners (Enrique Aynat, Estudios sobre el ‘Holocausto’, Graficas Hurtado, Valencia 1994.) Zyklon-B was not mentioned until sometime later. After the liberation of Auschwitz Soviet-Jewish war correspondent Boris Polevoi ublished a report on an “electric conveyor belt” upon which inmates were killed with “electrical current.” (Pravda, February 2, 1945.) Bruno Baum, was transferred to Auschwitz from Brandenburg prison in 1943. In his memoirs he wrote: > [@](#): > > "It is no exaggeration when I say that the majority of all Auschwitz propaganda, which was spread at that time all over the world, was written by ourselves in the camp…“We carried out this propaganda in [for] the world public until our very last day of presence in Auschwitz.” (p. 34-35) Of course, this doesn’t mean that it didn’t happen but combined with the technical implausibility (see earlier posts) it seems the logical conclusion is that the claims from electric conveyor belts, electric baths, to gas chambers (other than the small delousing facilities to disenfect clothing and bedding), in Germany and Poland were atrocity propaganda. ---
**Author:** ![Peter\_Morris](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/peter_morris/32/359_2.png) [@Peter\_Morris](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Peter_Morris)\ **Post date:** [March 29, 2017, 10:35am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-dont-understand-holocaust-denial/781963/275 "2017-03-29T10:35:24Z")
> [@Peter\_Morris](#): > > So, about how many people died in the camps? > > I’ll make it multiple choice. Was it: > > a) less than a million > b) between 1 and 2 million > c) between 2 and 4 million > d) between 4 and 8 million > e) between 8 and 12 million > f) over 12 million How about an answer, Chen? ---
**Author:** ![iiandyiiii](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/iiandyiiii/32/7924_2.png) [@iiandyiiii](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/iiandyiiii)\ **Post date:** [March 29, 2017, 11:30am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-dont-understand-holocaust-denial/781963/276 "2017-03-29T11:30:47Z")
Once again, every single one of Chen019’s arguments are either trivial irrelevancies that, at best, show that some tiny number of witness reports might be mistaken and not every single Nazi was personally engaged in Jew extermination at all times (which no one ever claimed anyway) or outright false assertions, like his incredibly ignorant crap about the German language. He ignores the reports in which the Einsatzgruppen specifically and explicitly counts the number of Jewish men, women, and children they killed, and the words of Heinrich Himmler explicitly referring to the need to exterminate Jewish men, women, and children. He ignores the vast majority of the evidence in favor of nitpicking about a very small amount. Nothing new here, and the same old crap that’s been bouncing around the slums of the Internet for decades. ---
**Author:** ![inscrutable](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/i/a88e4f/32.png) [@inscrutable](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/inscrutable)\ **Post date:** [March 29, 2017, 12:52pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-dont-understand-holocaust-denial/781963/277 "2017-03-29T12:52:12Z")
> [@iiandyiiii](#): > > Once again, every single one of Chen019’s arguments are either trivial irrelevancies that, at best, show that some tiny number of witness reports might be mistaken and not every single Nazi was personally engaged in Jew extermination at all times (which no one ever claimed anyway) or outright false assertions, like his incredibly ignorant crap about the German language. He ignores the reports in which the Einsatzgruppen specifically and explicitly counts the number of Jewish men, women, and children they killed, and the words of Heinrich Himmler explicitly referring to the need to exterminate Jewish men, women, and children. He ignores the vast majority of the evidence in favor of nitpicking about a very small amount. > > Nothing new here, and the same old crap that’s been bouncing around the slums of the Internet for decades. Well, it seems to me that he’s just pointing out that war propaganda is still tainting the real history here. ---
**Author:** ![iiandyiiii](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/iiandyiiii/32/7924_2.png) [@iiandyiiii](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/iiandyiiii)\ **Post date:** [March 29, 2017, 1:36pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-dont-understand-holocaust-denial/781963/278 "2017-03-29T13:36:45Z")
> [@inscrutable](#): > > Well, it seems to me that he’s just pointing out that war propaganda is still tainting the real history here. Then you obviously missed his ridiculous sidestepping (and hilariously false assertions about the German language) regarding to the recordings of Himmler’s speeches, among many of the other things he’s ignored or sidestepped. ---
**Author:** ![QuickSilver](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/quicksilver/32/7832_2.png) [@QuickSilver](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/QuickSilver)\ **Post date:** [March 29, 2017, 1:52pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-dont-understand-holocaust-denial/781963/279 "2017-03-29T13:52:22Z")
> [@inscrutable](#): > > Well, it seems to me that he’s just pointing out that war propaganda is still tainting the real history here. Which parts of _Nazi crimes against humanity_ are being unfairly characterized by ‘war propaganda’? By whom? For what reason? ---
**Author:** ![GIGObuster](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/gigobuster/32/421_2.png) [@GIGObuster](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/GIGObuster)\ **Post date:** [March 29, 2017, 2:08pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-dont-understand-holocaust-denial/781963/280 "2017-03-29T14:08:34Z")
> [@Chen019](#): > > Of course, this doesn’t mean that it didn’t happen but combined with the technical implausibility (see earlier posts) it seems the logical conclusion is that the claims from electric conveyor belts, electric baths, to gas chambers (other than the small delousing facilities to disenfect clothing and bedding), in Germany and Poland were atrocity propaganda. As it was shown already you are just swallowing the Holocaust denier propaganda, the short item here is that you are still hung up on clear mistakes and indeed propaganda that was anyhow acknowledged for decades already. The entry from the Holocaust museum in the USA clearly shows that no one seriously thinks that all concentration camps were the same, that BTW does not deny that even in the camps with no gas chambers people were murdered by the SS and other Nazis. > **[Buchenwald](https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/buchenwald)** > > The Nazi regime established the Buchenwald camp in 1937. Learn about the camp’s prisoners, conditions there, forced labor, subcamps, medical experiments, and liberation. > [@](#): > > On April 11, 1945, in expectation of liberation, starved and emaciated prisoners stormed the watchtowers, seizing control of the camp. Later that afternoon, US forces entered Buchenwald. Soldiers from the 6th Armored Division, part of the Third Army, found more than 21,000 people in the camp. Between July 1937 and April 1945, the SS imprisoned some 250,000 persons from all countries of Europe in Buchenwald. Exact mortality figures for the Buchenwald site can only be estimated, as camp authorities never registered a significant number of the prisoners. The SS murdered at least 56,000 male prisoners in the Buchenwald camp system, some 11,000 of them Jews. Besides being gunned down, victims also were subjected to lethal injections. Point being that even if no gas chambers were in several camps the idea was still to make elimination easier. Your attempts at using errors as a tool to discredit what has been established elsewhere to take place, the genocide of the Jews and mass murder of Nazi enemies, has not been debunked at all. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-dont-understand-holocaust-denial/781963.md?page=13) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-dont-understand-holocaust-denial/781963.md?page=15)