# 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:** 16
**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:** [April 9, 2017, 12:24pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-dont-understand-holocaust-denial/781963/301 "2017-04-09T12:24:19Z")
More sidestepping the mountains of data, including the recorded words of multiple Nazi officials, to throw in a few weird (and questionably cited) factoids that don’t actually refute anything but just distract. ---
**Author:** ![Dissonance](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/85f322/32.png) [@Dissonance](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dissonance)\ **Post date:** [April 9, 2017, 4:17pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-dont-understand-holocaust-denial/781963/302 "2017-04-09T16:17:20Z")
Still not a peep about the [Jäger Report](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J%C3%A4ger_Report) or any attempt to square how the deliberate, pre-planned murder of 2 million men, women and children (1.3 million of them Jews) by the Einsatzgruppen in open air shootings in the wake of Barbarossa fits with the IHR lie that the Einsatzgruppen were merely suppressing local resistance? No comment on [Generalplan Ost](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generalplan_Ost) and how the planned enslavement, expulsion, and mass murder of most Slavic peoples in Europe fits with the denial that the Holocaust happened and it was only some Jews dying of typhus in camps and the Germans suppressing partisans after Barbarossa? Color me unsurprised. ---
**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:** [April 9, 2017, 4:42pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-dont-understand-holocaust-denial/781963/303 "2017-04-09T16:42:06Z")
I see that Chen019 again goes for previously debunked points from holocaust deniers. He never learns. > **[How to Refute Holocaust Denial](https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/how-to-refute-holocaust-denial)** > > Encyclopedia of Jewish and Israeli history, politics and culture, with biographies, statistics, articles and documents on topics from anti-Semitism to Zionism. > [@](#): > > “No credible demographic statistics”? This is the second internal contradiction – see question 2 and question 15. The Anglo-American committee who studied the issue estimated the number of Jewish victims at 5.7 million. This was based on population statistics. Here is the exact breakdown, country by country: > > ``` > Germany - 195,000 > Austria - 53,000 > Czechoslovakia - 255,000 > Denmark - 1,500 > France - 140,000 > Belgium - 57,000 > Luxemburg - 3,000 > Norway - 1,000 > Holland - 120,000 > Italy - 20,000 > Yugoslavia - 64,000 > Greece - 64,000 > Bulgaria - 5,000 > Romania - 530,000 > Hungary - 200,000 > Poland - 3,271,000 > USSR - 1,050,000 > > Total Number Jews Killed - 5,721,500 > > ``` > > (This estimate was arrived at using population statistics, and not by adding the number of casualties at each camp. These are also available – for instance, a separate file with the ruling of a German court regarding the number of victims in Treblinka is available. The SS kept rather accurate records, and many of the documents survived, reinforced by eyewitness accounts). > > Some estimates are lower, some are higher, but this is the magnitude in question. In an article in CMU’s student newspaper, the head of CMU’s History Department, Peter Stearns, is quoted as saying that newly discovered documents – especially in the former USSR – indicate that the number of victims is higher than six million. Other historians claim not much over five million. The Encyclopedia of the Holocaust uses 5,596,000 as a minimum and 5,860,000 as a maximum (Gutman, 1990, p. 1799). > > In summary: > > “Revisionists” often claim, correctly, that the burden of proof is on historians. The proof, of course, has been a matter of public record since late 1945, and is available in libraries around the world. The burden has been met, many, many times over. You’ve just seen a brief presentation of some of the highlights of that immense body of proof; much more is readily available. > > To even argue that the Holocaust never happened is ludicrous. To claim straight-faced that none of this proof even exists is beyond ludicrous, and it is a clear example of “revisionist” dishonesty. ---
**Author:** ![Weisshund](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/ba8739/32.png) [@Weisshund](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Weisshund)\ **Post date:** [April 9, 2017, 9:13pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-dont-understand-holocaust-denial/781963/304 "2017-04-09T21:13:34Z")
> [@GIGObuster](#): > > I see that Chen019 again goes for previously debunked points from holocaust deniers. He never learns. He is going to tell you none of those people died, but he wont tell you where they magically disappeared to. :smack: ---
**Author:** ![Max\_Torque](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/e9bcb4/32.png) [@Max\_Torque](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Max_Torque)\ **Post date:** [April 10, 2017, 3:44pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-dont-understand-holocaust-denial/781963/305 "2017-04-10T15:44:24Z")
Hell, if you want proof of the numbers killed, just go to Poland and try to find a Jewish person. Before WWII, Poland’s Jewish population was about 3 million. Today? Maybe 20,000. More than 90% of the Jews in Poland died at the hands of the Nazis. ---
**Author:** ![PatrickLondon](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/patricklondon/32/4422_2.png) [@PatrickLondon](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/PatrickLondon)\ **Post date:** [April 10, 2017, 5:05pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-dont-understand-holocaust-denial/781963/306 "2017-04-10T17:05:22Z")
> [@](#): > > “Revisionists” often claim, correctly, that the burden of proof is on historians. The proof, of course, has been a matter of public record since late 1945, and is available in libraries around the world. And subsequent investigations at the micro-level, as it were, of what happened to particular individuals and in particular towns\*, over and over again, have never produced any contradictions: they may amend our understanding of processes, but they all point in the same direction. \*A couple of recent examples: Philippe Sands’s East West Street, and Mary Fulbrook’s A small town near Auschwitz: ordinary Nazis and the Holocaust But I suppose, like a more sinister form of flat-earthers, some people will never be convinced. They just have to be the contrary ones: and the more contrary they are to the most generally accepted facts and understandings, the happier they are. Well, happy may not be the word: I remember hearing an interview with David Irving once, when the interviewer got out of him an abiding memory from his childhood of being in the “odd family out” and a sense of everyone looking at him and his family - which raised the question why he devotes his adult life to putting himself into such an extreme modern equivalent. What is it that makes such people cling so self-righteously to such self-evident and malignant nonsense? ---
**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:** [April 10, 2017, 7:46pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-dont-understand-holocaust-denial/781963/307 "2017-04-10T19:46:43Z")
> [@PatrickLondon](#): > > What is it that makes such people cling so self-righteously to such self-evident and malignant nonsense? One might ask that of any conspiracy theorist and racist. It’s their identity; their unfulfilled need to feel special because they hold the keys to ‘knowledge’ nobody else has (or believes). Often it’s all they have left. Pathetic, if not outright delusional, really. ---
**Author:** ![Silver\_lining](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/aca169/32.png) [@Silver\_lining](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Silver_lining)\ **Post date:** [April 10, 2017, 8:08pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-dont-understand-holocaust-denial/781963/308 "2017-04-10T20:08:52Z")
With all of the films and records, there is no such thing as an educated or informed holocaust denier. I think some very twisted world leaders say it because their nations controls the flow of information, including the web. So if they say it, people believe it. I meet one of the survivors once at a mall. An older man sitting on a bench. His stories were so grizzly and real, I spoke with the man for an hour. ---
**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:** [April 11, 2017, 2:27am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-dont-understand-holocaust-denial/781963/309 "2017-04-11T02:27:36Z")
> [@PatrickLondon](#): > > I remember hearing an interview with David Irving once, when the interviewer got out of him an abiding memory from his childhood of being in the “odd family out” and a sense of everyone looking at him and his family - which raised the question why he devotes his adult life to putting himself into such an extreme modern equivalent. What is it that makes such people cling so self-righteously to such self-evident and malignant nonsense? David Irving, like so many others, found that Holocaust denial gave him a platform and pseudo-intellectual cover for promoting anti-Semitic beliefs: [David Irving](http://www.jpost.com/Not-Just-News/Q-and-A-with-Holocaust-denier-David-Irving-Im-not-an-anti-Semite-yet-415004): _“The Jews should ask, ‘Why us’? Maybe it’s how they have acted over the thousands of years. ‘Maybe it is all our fault’”_ Another prominent Holocaust “revisionist”, [Ernst Zundel](https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/individual/ernst-zundel): _“Wherever we look, we White people find ourselves besieged by peoples of other races who compete aggressively against us for jobs, food, housing, education and above all, power! The Jews are particularly adept at seizing or insinuating themselves into strategic positions in our society where they wield power far beyond the extent of their numbers.”_ [David Duke](http://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/david-duke-hails-donald-trump-for-thwarting-the-jewish-supremacists-who-control-our-country/) (who passed on his own brand of wisdom at Iran’s notorious Holocaust Conference, no doubt endearing himself to attendees by calling the Holocaust a “device” that he sees as the “pillar of Zionist imperialism”): _“These Jewish supremacists who control our country are the real problem and the reason why America is not great”._ And on and on. Scratch a committed Holocaust denier, find a Jew-hater. ---
**Author:** ![Dissonance](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/85f322/32.png) [@Dissonance](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dissonance)\ **Post date:** [April 11, 2017, 7:40pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-dont-understand-holocaust-denial/781963/310 "2017-04-11T19:40:09Z")
> [@Silver\_lining](#): > > With all of the films and records, there is no such thing as an educated or informed holocaust denier. I’d actually say the number of Holocaust deniers who are either poorly educated or ill-informed is a very small minority. Education and information has nothing to do with Holocaust denial, **Holocaust deniers know they are lying**. Uneducated or ill informed are certainly not words I’d use to describe David Irving, known liar are the words I’d use. From **GIGObuster** ’s link: > [@](#): > > “Revisionists” often claim, correctly, that the burden of proof is on historians. The proof, of course, has been a matter of public record since late 1945, and is available in libraries around the world. The burden has been met, many, many times over. You’ve just seen a brief presentation of some of the highlights of that immense body of proof; much more is readily available. > > To even argue that the Holocaust never happened is ludicrous. To claim straight-faced that none of this proof even exists is beyond ludicrous, and it is a clear example of “revisionist” dishonesty. This is what I mean about it pissing me off that Holocaust deniers have tried and largely succeeded in co-opting the term revisionist history. Note the use of quotes around “revisionists”: that’s because what holocaust deniers are engaged in isn’t revisionist history, what they are engaged in isn’t history of any kind. What they are engaged in is lying. Actual revisionist history is a perfectly respectable activity; history isn’t static, there are always new or overlooked sources of information out there. ---
**Author:** ![Buck\_Godot](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/buck_godot/32/6573_2.png) [@Buck\_Godot](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Buck_Godot)\ **Post date:** [April 11, 2017, 9:26pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-dont-understand-holocaust-denial/781963/311 "2017-04-11T21:26:46Z")
> [@Dissonance](#): > > I’d actually say the number of Holocaust deniers who are either poorly educated or ill-informed is a very small minority. Education and information has nothing to do with Holocaust denial, **Holocaust deniers know they are lying**. Uneducated or ill informed are certainly not words I’d use to describe David Irving, known liar are the words I’d use. > . That may be true for some of he leaders, but I suspect that most of the rank and file actually do believe their rhetoric. Again they may not be uneducated or ill informed, but get the same psychological kick of being right when everyone else is wrong that other conspiracy theorists get, and make themselves immune to inconvenient facts with confirmatory bias. ---
**Author:** ![Spice\_Weasel](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/spice_weasel/32/5435_2.png) [@Spice\_Weasel](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Spice_Weasel)\ **Post date:** [April 12, 2017, 3:06am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-dont-understand-holocaust-denial/781963/312 "2017-04-12T03:06:22Z")
> [@Jackmannii](#): > > David Irving, like so many others, found that Holocaust denial gave him a platform and pseudo-intellectual cover for promoting anti-Semitic beliefs: > > [David Irving](http://www.jpost.com/Not-Just-News/Q-and-A-with-Holocaust-denier-David-Irving-Im-not-an-anti-Semite-yet-415004): _“The Jews should ask, ‘Why us’? Maybe it’s how they have acted over the thousands of years. ‘Maybe it is all our fault’”_ > > Another prominent Holocaust “revisionist”, [Ernst Zundel](https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/individual/ernst-zundel): _“Wherever we look, we White people find ourselves besieged by peoples of other races who compete aggressively against us for jobs, food, housing, education and above all, power! The Jews are particularly adept at seizing or insinuating themselves into strategic positions in our society where they wield power far beyond the extent of their numbers.”_ > > [David Duke](http://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/david-duke-hails-donald-trump-for-thwarting-the-jewish-supremacists-who-control-our-country/) (who passed on his own brand of wisdom at Iran’s notorious Holocaust Conference, no doubt endearing himself to attendees by calling the Holocaust a “device” that he sees as the “pillar of Zionist imperialism”): _“These Jewish supremacists who control our country are the real problem and the reason why America is not great”._ > > And on and on. > > Scratch a committed Holocaust denier, find a Jew-hater. This kind of shit blows my mind. I grew up in the rural Midwest where racism abounded but I never even met a Jewish person until college. It’s like, really? Another ethnic group to be pointlessly racist against? It just drives home the idiocy, I think, when you see something like this outside of your own cultural context, with no stereotypes as a point of reference. The idea that Jews somehow brought thousands of years of brutal persecution on themselves is so patently absurd, it would be funny, if it weren’t tragic. I’m curious how people like Chen feel about taking their arguments from such transparently vile humans. Sent from my Nexus 5X using Tapatalk ---
**Author:** ![Chen019](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/f19dbf/32.png) [@Chen019](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chen019)\ **Post date:** [April 13, 2017, 11:25am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-dont-understand-holocaust-denial/781963/313 "2017-04-13T11:25:43Z")
> [@iiandyiiii](#): > > More sidestepping the mountains of data, including the recorded words of multiple Nazi officials, to throw in a few weird (and questionably cited) factoids that don’t actually refute anything but just distract. I love how you throw out accusations while doing the same thing yourself. What data are you relying on? What “factoids” do you find distracting? The inmate records that completely contradict the ludicrous claims about mass-extermination? The 3,138 Hungarian Jews who received medical treatment at Auschwitz? The fact 1,426 of them had undergone surgery? A circular letter to the commanders of all camps including Auschwitz in which he stated that Jewish prisoners in urgent need of an operation could be treated in the nearest hospital? The factoid that recording 2,584 Jews aged from 0 to 10 years at Auschwitz? The constantly shifting theories to try and shoe-horn what is clearly war propaganda, into something remotely plausible, even if it contradicts earlier claims? Things like 1986 Shmuel Krakowski, then archives director of Yad Vashem, the international centre for Holocaust documentation in Jerusalem, told the Jerusalem Post that most of the 20,000 testimonies he had from alleged survivors of the Holocaust were untrustworthy, fraudulent, lacking support or in some way untruthful? ---
**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:** [April 13, 2017, 12:06pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-dont-understand-holocaust-denial/781963/314 "2017-04-13T12:06:06Z")
> [@Chen019](#): > > Things like 1986 Shmuel Krakowski, then archives director of Yad Vashem, the international centre for Holocaust documentation in Jerusalem, told the Jerusalem Post that most of the 20,000 testimonies he had from alleged survivors of the Holocaust were untrustworthy, fraudulent, lacking support or in some way untruthful? This claim is a standard part of Holocaust denial. It is also false. - To the Editor of the Jerusalem Post [http://www.nizkor.org/features/denial-of-science/krakowski-01.html](http://www.nizkor.org/features/denial-of-science/krakowski-01.html) ---
**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:** [April 13, 2017, 12:09pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-dont-understand-holocaust-denial/781963/315 "2017-04-13T12:09:31Z")
> [@Chen019](#): > > I love how you throw out accusations while doing the same thing yourself. What data are you relying on? How about Himmler’s own words? Your attempt to change the meaning of German words was laughable. How about the words of so many other Nazi officials? How about the Jager report? How about minutes to the Wannsee Conference? How about the evidence of mass graves and human remains? How about the thousands of pictures, including mass graves and stacked corpses (that were very obviously starved, which is not a symptom of typhus or any similar disease)? How about the fact that approximately 6 million Jews disappeared from Europe during the 30s and 40s? > [@](#): > > What “factoids” do you find distracting? The inmate records that completely contradict the ludicrous claims about mass-extermination? Bullshit and false. > [@](#): > > The 3,138 Hungarian Jews who received medical treatment at Auschwitz? The fact 1,426 of them had undergone surgery? > > A circular letter to the commanders of all camps including Auschwitz in which he stated that Jewish prisoners in urgent need of an operation could be treated in the nearest hospital? > > The factoid that recording 2,584 Jews aged from 0 to 10 years at Auschwitz? Whether true or not, none of these do anything to counter the mountains of evidence for the Holocaust. That some Jews may have received medical treatment, or weren’t otherwise immediately killed, says nothing about whether the Nazis attempted to exterminate the Jews from Europe. > [@](#): > > The constantly shifting theories to try and shoe-horn what is clearly war propaganda, into something remotely plausible, even if it contradicts earlier claims? Bullshit and false. > [@](#): > > Things like 1986 Shmuel Krakowski, then archives director of Yad Vashem, the international centre for Holocaust documentation in Jerusalem, told the Jerusalem Post that most of the 20,000 testimonies he had from alleged survivors of the Holocaust were untrustworthy, fraudulent, lacking support or in some way untruthful? Bullshit and false (see above post). And irrelevant anyway, whether true or not. That one guy may have said others were lying is a grain of sand compared to the mountain of other evidence. How about Himmler’s words? How about the Jager report? How about the photos? How about the mass graves and human remains? How about the missing millions of Jews? You’ve made multiple bullshit claims. Completely false crap, like your laughable statements about German words. ---
**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:** [April 13, 2017, 12:13pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-dont-understand-holocaust-denial/781963/316 "2017-04-13T12:13:35Z")
> [@Chen019](#): > > Things like 1986 Shmuel Krakowski, then archives director of Yad Vashem, the international centre for Holocaust documentation in Jerusalem, told the Jerusalem Post that most of the 20,000 testimonies he had from alleged survivors of the Holocaust were untrustworthy, fraudulent, lacking support or in some way untruthful? [More bullshit from you](http://www.ibiblio.org/team/history/controversy/abutz/jkrak.html), Chen019? [QUOTE=document linked above] Jamie McCarthy has pointed out to me a subsequent development I overlooked. Krakowski wrote a letter in reply, published on 21 August (p. 10), in which he complained "I said there are some - fortunately very few - testimonies, which proved to be inaccurate. [/QUOTE] ---
**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:** [April 13, 2017, 12:21pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-dont-understand-holocaust-denial/781963/317 "2017-04-13T12:21:59Z")
What are your specific objectives, **Chen019** , in your continued efforts to actively and deliberately engage in holocaust denial? What do you hope to achieve? In service of what? Assume that we do not accept your excuse that you’re simply addressing dissenting views on the subject - views that have been comprehensively and repeatedly debunked as revisionist lies here and by legitimate historians many times over. ---
**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:** [April 13, 2017, 3:02pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-dont-understand-holocaust-denial/781963/318 "2017-04-13T15:02:44Z")
> [@Chen019](#): > > What “factoids” do you find distracting? The inmate records that completely contradict the ludicrous claims about mass-extermination? The 3,138 Hungarian Jews who received medical treatment at Auschwitz? The fact 1,426 of them had undergone surgery? > > A circular letter to the commanders of all camps including Auschwitz in which he stated that Jewish prisoners in urgent need of an operation could be treated in the nearest hospital? [QUOTE=google dictionary] Factoid (n.) a brief or trivial item of news or information. ``` an assumption or speculation that is reported and repeated so often that it becomes accepted as fact. ``` [/QUOTE] That you take your repeating of those holocaust denier misleading points as facts does not change the reality that those remain assumptions from you. The evidence shows that you just swallowed the denier of history lies. The most important point here is that the numbers you are reporting are not being contradicted but the stupid idea that those numbers about \*\*\*some \*\*\*Jews getting health care have never been explained by researchers. They did, many times before. There is the fact that Jews that had specific knowledge, abilities or muscle that the Germans needed for their war machine were spared, and if they had beauty Jewish women had also the chance to survive by the Nazis turning them into prostitutes for the Army or the SS. > **[Concentration Camp Bordellos: 'The Main Thing Was to Survive at All'](https://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/concentration-camp-bordellos-the-main-thing-was-to-survive-at-all-a-632558.html)** > > Concentration camp brothels remain a hushed-up chapter of the Nazi-era horrors. Now a German researcher has probed the dark subject -- and has revealed the meticulous cruelty of the so-called "special buildings." It was not only because of issues like that which compelled the Nazis to take care of Jews that they saw as useful. But there was also another factor: the brutal scientific experiments the Nazis did on human subjects. Jews were specially targeted and the treatment some got can be explained logically by the pedantic reason that some Jews were the control group of that brutal experimentation. Experimentations at such scales that the doctors and scientists involved also were judged at Nuremberg in other trials besides the most famous one. > **[Medical Research: The Dangers to the Human Subjects | Marcia Angell](https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2015/11/19/medical-research-dangers-human-subjects/)** > > Given the American faith in medical advances, it is easy to forget that clinical trials can be risky business. They raise formidable ethical problems since researchers are responsible both for protecting human subjects and for advancing the interests... > [@](#): > > The most horrifying and grotesque of these were the medical experiments carried out by Nazi Germany during World War II on inmates in concentration camps.3 Although it is difficult to believe now, the people who designed these experiments—among them some of the most prominent physicians in Germany at the time—did have a purpose. They wanted to gain information that could save the lives of German troops in battle. In one experiment in Dachau, for example, their aim was to find the maximum altitude at which it would be safe for pilots to parachute from stricken planes. To that end, they put inmates in vacuum chambers that could duplicate progressively lower air pressure, up to the equivalent of an altitude of about 68,000 feet. About 40 percent of the victims died from lack of oxygen during these hideous experiments. > > In another experiment, the researchers wanted to study how long pilots who had parachuted into the frigid North Sea could survive. They immersed victims in tanks of ice water for up to three hours, and many froze to death. The Nazis also tested a typhus vaccine by administering it to some, but not all, of a group of prisoners. They then infected them all with typhus to compare the death rate—an experiment identical in design to my hypothetical example. > > … > > Two of them [excuses] are particularly important, because in modified form they have to this day been used repeatedly in defense of unethical research. > > First, the Nazi doctors offered the utilitarian argument that their research would save more lives than it cost. They went on to say that this justification was all the more convincing, because the lives at stake were troops fighting for the very survival of their country. Extreme circumstances demand extreme action, they said. Second, the Nazi doctors pointed out that many of their human subjects were condemned to death anyway (for “crimes” such as being a Gypsy or a Jew). Those selected for medical experimentation might even have lived longer than they otherwise would. > > The Nazi Doctors’ Trial resulted in the conviction in August 1947 of sixteen of the twenty-three defendants, seven of whom were hanged and nine imprisoned. That item about Typhus shows how dumb it was to make the implied point that victims of typhus should be discounted from the holocaust totals, fie to that. As pointed before, other concentration camps that were not set for extermination avoided typhus (in Austria for example, as noted already in the thread) showing that Nazis also knew how to use natural diseases as part of the holocaust effort. They still thought that they needed healthy control groups for the “uber science” they thought they had the right to do. ---
**Author:** ![Chen019](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/f19dbf/32.png) [@Chen019](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chen019)\ **Post date:** [April 14, 2017, 6:12am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-dont-understand-holocaust-denial/781963/319 "2017-04-14T06:12:01Z")
> [@QuickSilver](#): > > What are your specific objectives, **Chen019** , in your continued efforts to actively and deliberately engage in holocaust denial? What do you hope to achieve? In service of what? Assume that we do not accept your excuse that you’re simply addressing dissenting views on the subject - views that have been comprehensively and repeatedly debunked as revisionist lies here and by legitimate historians many times over. Thanks for the correction above. If anything else I’ve said above is incorrect, please point me to it. ---
**Author:** ![Chen019](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/f19dbf/32.png) [@Chen019](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chen019)\ **Post date:** [April 14, 2017, 7:43am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-dont-understand-holocaust-denial/781963/320 "2017-04-14T07:43:29Z")
> [@QuickSilver](#): > > What are your specific objectives, **Chen019** , in your continued efforts to actively and deliberately engage in holocaust denial? What do you hope to achieve? In service of what? Assume that we do not accept your excuse that you’re simply addressing dissenting views on the subject - views that have been comprehensively and repeatedly debunked as revisionist lies here and by legitimate historians many times over. Sorry, I just wanted to add to my comment above, but have run out of time to edit it. My objective is simply to point out, that in my view, the revisionists have good grounds to be skeptical. A few years ago I had no reason to query what the “legitimate historians” had to say. It wasn’t until I actually looked at some of the revisionist arguments that I realised that: a) \*\*Large parts of what was put forward by the prosecution at Nuremberg and reported in the media at the time have since been shown to be false. \*\* For instance, I was shocked to find that the detailed claims of mass extermination at Buchenwald and other German camps were undermined by the reports of doctors like Dr Russell Barton, Dr John E Gordon, or pathologist Dr Charles Larson who inspected the camps. I didn’t realise that it had been quietly acknowledged in 1960 that those claims were untrue. The claims that started as atrocity propaganda turned out to be just that, propaganda. I also didn’t know British Intelligence had been monitoring communications at Auschwitz and the causes of death being reported were basically the same as those in the German camps, typhus, diseases, shootings & hangings. Not gas, in fact there were considerable efforts to reduce the death rates - hence delousing using Zyklon to stop typhus spreading. There were also witnesses at Auschwitz and inmate records which contradicted the gas chamber stories. On top of that there was the evidence of the technical implausibility of the claims, both in terms of the numbers and method. Whether it be Germar Rudolf’s work, or David Cole’s fascinating video. **b) Academics, judges or scientists who question this get persecuted** This is why I find your claim that “legitimate historians” all agree to be completely naive. Professor Paul Rassinier was an inmate at Buchenwald because he was part of the resistance and a socialist. When he wrote that the claims of mass extermination using gas at Buchenwald were not true he was quickly attacked as a Nazi. Joel Hayward received first class honours for his [Masters thesis](http://www.vho.org/aaargh/fran/livres8/hay.pdf). The uni"]Masters thesis. The University didn’t make it available for several years and we it did, Hayward quickly started receiving death threats. He eventually took up a different career path. Judge Wilhelm Stäglich wrote a book in the 1970’s \*Auschwitz - A Judge Looks at the Evidence, \*. For his trouble his pension was cut and the book was destroyed. The University of Göttingen instituted proceedings against Stäglich in order to formally disaccredit the doctoral degree he had received there in 1951, ironically on the basis of a law introduced during the Hitler era. Professor Robert Faurisson has been physically assaulted on numerous occasions and fined for his work. Germar Rudolf, a Max Planck scientist, was asked to investigate the cyanide levels at Auschwitz. When he published the results he was sacked, kicked out of his PhD programme and later imprisoned. David Irving was of course imprisoned in Austria for comments he’d made years earlier. Science historian Nicholas Kollerstrom wrote an article questioning whether gas chambers were used for anything other than delousing. He was fired the next day from University College London. A book where he had contributed chapters on Sir Isaac Newton was pulped. About the only academic person I can think of in the US to write critically on the subject was a professor of computer science and engineering at Northwestern - Arthur Butz. His book was confiscated from libraries in Canada when in came out in the 70’s. Compared to the others he appears to have got off pretty lightly though, perhaps because it’s outside his field. Given that kind of climate is it really surprising that the only views of historians you’ve heard conform to the official narrative? Maybe read [Hayward’s thesis](http://www.vho.org/aaargh/fran/livres8/hay.pdf) and tell me whether you think it raises any genuine questions or not. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-dont-understand-holocaust-denial/781963.md?page=15) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-dont-understand-holocaust-denial/781963.md?page=17)