I started learning about the War in my childhood. We had the big* Life* book on WW2. (My father was a vet but died as a result of the Cold War, so I never heard any reminiscences. Mom said he didn’t say much about the 8th Air Force in 1943; if he’d lived, he might have gotten together with other old vets.)
We had a bit of war history in school–and the media (Life magazine, etc.) were awash with fiction & non-fiction about the War. Of course we had allies. And the Russians did much of the hardest work. Post-War, it was easy to mistrust Stalin–but the Russian people were admirable in many ways.
I knew about all of this before I became an adult & have continued to learn. Long before Spielberg–hey, isn’t that a Jewish name?
Congratulations on getting one of our most malignant xenophobes out of hiding to stand up with you. (I’m being sarcastic.)
Not to mention Poland was probably WORSE than even in Germany itself was for the Jews. Remember in “Schindler’s List” where Poles were cheering as the Jews in their town were being moved out? Jews escaping from concentration camps were rounded up by Poles and sent back. The Poles gladly moved into former Jewish property and after the war, didnt give it back.
One local person who was a holocaust survivor said it this way “I’ve forgiven the Germans but will never forgive the Poles”.
Of course now that Poland is a western ally you wont see any talk of this even though I hear antisemitism is still very big there.
The holocaust deniers don’t generally deny the existence of the Holocaust but they do minimize it. Its more like saying, “sure there was slavery but many of the slaves were very happy under kind slave masters that treated them like part of the family, and in any event, they were better off than they would have been running around in Africa”
While I cannot say that the two are completely related, or that one derives from the other there is a lot of overlap.
D List celebrities, such as rapper B.o.B. (who lost a twitter fight with N.D. Tyson last year over Flat Earth) spewed out a bunch of holocaust denial in his ‘revenge rap’ song against Tyson. Another D-lister, Tila Tequila went full Nazi for the attention and has also espoused a belief in Flat-Eartherism.
Again, it is uncertain if the two are completely related or if this is just crank magnetism at work.
Nontheless a lot of the weirder conspiracy nut theories find their roots in some sort of anti-semitism. For example, there are people who beleive the Atom Bomb, Nuclear weapons & Nuclear power are all faked. The core reason? Many jews were involved in the development of nuclear theory.
Conspiracy theories that are not challenge tend to have a ‘festering effect’. If someone throws out a bunch of holocaust denying ‘factoids’ and nobody calls them on it then anyone who comes across the thread later may wonder why nobody answered the claims. For a forum that tries to fight ignorance that would be rather a failure.
That’s a very poor assumption. Holocaust deniers know they are lying. It is impossible to look at the mountains of evidence and honestly come to the conclusion that the Holocaust didn’t happen at all, or that it was just some Jews dying of typhus and not a systematic plan by the Nazis to commit mass murder on an industrial scale. See for example the Jager report (full title “Complete tabulation of executions carried out in the Einsatzkommando 3 zone up to December 1, 1941”) which quite proudly tabulates the murder by open air firing squads of Jews and others by just one of the Einsatzkommando:
Lets say I rape you and there is physical evidence of my raping you. You really really wish that I hadn’t raped you. I assure everyone that I didn’t rape you, are you inclined to sympathize with my version of the story?
This is just an outsider’s view but AFAICT the Jewish story is one of surviving one fucking thing after another. Half their holidays seem to be a celebration of just surviving something that ought to have killed the lot of them but didn’t for some reason. Maybe God?
I can think of no other ethnic group that has flirted with near extinction in such a well documented way so many times in recorded history. Its almost habitual.
One should not forget that they toss red herrings too.
As others pointed out and the research that NOVA reported, the Nazis were aware that killing jews in Germany proper would had undermined the patina of law and order that was applied to the whole extermination effort. Many bigoted Nazis still had qualms about killing their fellow citizens. Not much about shooting or gassing the Jews from the conquered nations.
Even so, one big loophole was there and used a lot, camps that were not set as extermination ones many times shipped their sick or emaciated ones to the ones that did.
There are “minimizers” in the denier ranks, but there are also plenty who dismiss evidence of an extermination campaign altogether. Take “scholar” Arthur Butz (a professor of electrical engineering at Northwestern University) who has said:
“The “Final Solution” spoken of in the German documents was a program of evacuation, resettlement and deportation of Jews with the ultimate objective of expulsion from Europe. During the war Jews of various nationalities were being moved east, as one stage in this Final Solution.”*
Butz is on record as praising former Iranian President Ahmadinejad’s Holocaust denial (Ahmadinejad called the Holocaust “a fairy tale”).
*the above quote by Butz is from an article posted on the site of the “Institute for Historical Review”, which includes a lovely selection of Holocaust denial articles, in addition to fulminations about the “Jewish-Zionist” threat and innumerable pieces denouncing Israel. You start to sense a theme.
Well, that didn’t take long. No surprise. Sigh. But I guess you’re in luck, TGWATY. You can explore the psychology of Holocaust deniers with some Dopers who seem to fit that category.
I see no point in trying to counter any of the specific outlandish claims made here. The Holocaust has been studied extensively, even exhaustively. Beginning with the military investigators on the scene and continuing in the decades since with scholars from around the globe, the facts of the Holocaust are not in dispute. The exact number of victims will likely never be known, but the generally accepted figures were not plucked from thin air. They were arrived at through meticulous research.
Anyone who has any interest in learning about the Holocaust can do so by visiting his/her local library. The following books are a good place to start: Lucy Dawidowicz, The War Against the Jews; Leni Yahil, The Holocaust. (Obviously, using Hollywood movies as a source for learning about history is not the best strategy.) Those are just two books in an enormous canon. This scholarly territory is well traveled. And yet, strangely enough (ha!), the only people who have arrived at conclusions at odds with the vast amount of research on the subject happen to be those who are in ideological agreement with the Nazis. Funny, that.
Incidentally, the very tight range of estimates of “Number of Jewish victims of the holocaust”, between 5.45 - 5.95 million, is interesting because it seems to be much more precise than our estimates of other mass deaths. Estimates for the number of deaths attributed to Stalin, for example, are much more variable (people used to estimate anywhere between <1 million and 60 million, after the opening of the Soviet archives the estimates coalesced somewhere between 3 million and 20 million, I’d guess the true answer is somewhere around 10 million or a bit less). And this is in a society which, like Hitler’s Germany, was an industrialized world power. Estimates for other mass deaths like, e.g., West Pakistani atrocities against Bengalis in the early 1970s, are even more wildly variable.
We really do have certainty about the scale of the Holocaust, much more so than for other modern atrocities, and there’s not really any room for denial in good faith or otherwise.
Well, maybe. I could make some observation that, while you might have to, it’s usually wise to flag up that you’re doing so in advance, merely to forestall any suspicions of Holocaust denial.
On the other hand, thanks for the confirmation that you are relying on Holocaust deniers for your information.
I’m not sure ahmedenijad falls into the “nothing happened” category. I thought it fell into “its waaaay overblown and certainly not enough to justify stealing Palestine from the Palestinians” category
So why don’t you share some Holocaust facts with us, then, O Wise One?
Here, I’ll get you started. Here’s one of my “favorite” accounts. Quoted from page 307 of the excellent “The End of the World,” by Otto Friedrich (1982) (only one chapter of which deals with the Holocaust, specifically at Auschwitz):
(Apologies in advance for the brutal imagery discussed, similar in nature to the horrible photographs Weisshund has added to this thread.)
“Before World War II, the talk (by the “organized criminal ZIonists”) intensified and the activities increased. In the European countries, the very twisted show of “anti-Semitism” began. Of course, some governments and their people always hated the Jews because of the ugly conduct of some of them. They wanted to drive the Jews out of Europe. But anti-Semitism was planned mainly by some European governments and politicians, and by the Zionist network. They made hundreds of films, wrote hundreds of books, spread rumors, and conducted psychological warfare, in order to drive them away, to the land of Palestine.
Four or five years after World War II, they suddenly claimed that during that war, the Holocaust affair had taken place. In other words, according to their claims, several million Jews were burned in the crematoria. They created two slogans. The first was about the injustice suffered by the Jewish people. By means of lies, very twisted propaganda, and psychological warfare, they created the notion that the Jews suffered injustice, and, secondly, that they needed a land and an independent state. They acted so effectively that some of the world’s politicians and intellectuals were also deceived and influenced…If the Holocaust that you talk about was real, why don’t you allow the subject to be studied? One can freely research any issue, except for this issue, which is sealed. It is a black box, which they do not allow to be opened or reexamined.”
a year ago January (for Holocaust Remembrance Day) I started reading KL a History of the Nazi Concentration Camps which is a huge, very well written scholarly book I recommend to anyone looking for facts and wanting to understand the enormity of what happened. It took me 3 months to read because it’s overwhelming but I made myself finish because since millions of people went through this I figure the least I can do is understand what happened.
one of the parts that struck me the hardest is when Jews - right there, giving witness - were not believed from the start. at least one monster (I forget his name but it was in Płaszów) was found not guilty of war crimes because the jury felt the crimes described were too terrible to be believed. so they didn’t believe them.
