Scale matters, its not the only thing that matters but one of the things that makes the Holocaust so significant is that it was so fucking big. 600,000 would be <10% of all Jews living in Nazi controlled territory. 6 million would be 80%.
And a grand time was had by all!
Well, the Germans have a well-deserved reputation for keeping meticulous, even OCD, records. :o
Probably true, but the stereotype tends to somehow morph into the common belief that Nazi Germany had an ultra-efficient military-industrial economy. Latter-day analysis of the degree of factional infighting (among other elements) tends to show otherwise.
That’s how your post comes off, especially the last line. Them Jews just have a habit of getting into trouble, tsk tsk. :dubious:
It’d be nice if, instead of trying to minimize former Iranian President Ahmadinejad’s repulsive views, you acknowledged that he’s a flaming bigot and flat-out Holocaust denier.*
*Ahmadinejad’s credibility among rational folk may also have been damaged by statements blaming the West for creating AIDS to weaken poorer countries, suggesting the U.S. was responsible for 9/11 etc. etc.
Damuri Ajashi and Jackmannii, back off on the personal stuff or take it to The BBQ Pit. It is not relevant to the thread.
[ /Moderating ]
It seems remarkable because there is a taboo against pointing out the obvious.
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At the Nuremberg Tribunal of 1945-1946, Allied government officials presented apparently conclusive evidence to prove that camps “on German soil” – such as Dachau and Buchenwald – were “extermination” centers. Sir Hartley Shawcross, chief British prosecutor at the main Nuremberg trial, accordingly declared in his closing address on July 26, 1946, that “murder [was] conducted like some mass production industry in the gas chambers and the ovens” of Buchenwald, Dachau, Oranienburg – all “on German soil” – as well as at other German-run camps.
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This wasn’t just based on a “conflation” of death camps and labor camps. It was based on eyewitness testimony. For example, former inmate Dr. Franz Blaha, for example, provided eyewitness testimony at Nuremberg about gas chamber killings of “many prisoners” at Dachau.
An official French government report accepted by the Tribunal as exhibit RF-301 (document 274-F) charged:
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As I’ve noted above, all this was contradicted by the pathology evidence and physicians like Russell Barton, & John Gordon who noted that typhus epidemics were ravaging the camps. It was also contradicted by Professor Paul Rassinier, who in the process, became the first prominent revisionist.
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Then in 1960 Dr. Martin Broszat of Germany’s semi-official Institute for Contemporary History acknowledged in a letter published in the Hamburg weekly Die Zeit that the extermination claims in relation to camps in Germany were not true. Simon Wiesenthal later accepted this was the case. In doing so, Broszat implicitly also conceded that the “evidence” presented at Nuremberg and elsewhere for extermination and gassings in those camps was discredited.
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So it is then claimed that of course the extermination camps were only in Poland. Where conveniently the US pathologist Larson was unable to inspect.
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Nonetheless, the British Intelligence Service was able to eavesdrop on almost all German military radio communications. They intercepted communications at Auschwitz from January 1942 to January 1943.
7.The decoded messages enabled the compilation of statistics. The radio messages from 28 October 1942 – taking a single day at random – reveal, for example, that Auschwitz Concentration Camp contained a total, all told, of 25,298 inmates: 18,754 men and 6,544 women; including 10,755 Jews, 8,822 Poles, 1,369 Russians and 1,578 Germans. It was also learned that there were exactly 787 Zugänge and 168 Abgänge on 28 July 1942; Zugänge referred to the arrival of new inmates; Abgänge referred to deaths, executions, releases and inmates transferred to other camps.
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So, as with the camps in Germany - typhus outbreaks were again a major threat. Hence the need for new arrivals to shave their hair, while clothing and bedding was deloused in small facilities, specifically designed for such activities, with more than adequate ventilation to vent fumes.
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The claimed areas where people were gassed have negligible to non-existent cyanide levels (presumably they fumigated for bugs & lice now and then, while the delousing areas have high levels on the walls.
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There are various technical factors that make the claimed areas where gassing of people took place laughably implausible. For a detailed account I would recommend ex-Max Planck scientist Germar Rudolf’s detailed report. Rudolf comments:
The tale is woven around all of the factors that don’t agree with it:
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Dr. Larson found no gas deaths - well the gas deaths must have been in the camps he didn’t visit.
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The British Intelligence didn’t intercept any references to gas - well it was too secret
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The claimed areas where the gassing happened are technically implausible and there is negligible cyanide residue - well it must have been somewhere else…
Do you see how it goes?
Once again Chen019 spews a load of nonsense and entirely and very conspicuously ignores the words of Heinrich Himmler, which were on tape for all to hear:
Yes, modern maternity wards do not have perfect records on lack of infant mortality, and that is a more relevant fact than that a maternity “in Auschwitz” was in a warzone.
However, if someone did find some isolated stat about a birthing center “in Auschwitz” with a low infant mortality rate, or a even a zero death rate for a particular period of time (it might have had no deaths for a period of months, say, and it was relevant because some other area that was supposedly better had several in the same period of time), it probably was in Auschwitz, the city, not Auschwitz, the death camp.
Auschwitz was in a Polish city called Oswiecim. It’s pronounced “osh-VEE-eh-chim” in Polish, “OSH-pitz-in” in Yiddish, and Auschwitz in German. The concentration camp was named for the city, and the convention since about 1980 has been to refer, in English, to the camp as Auschwitz, and the city as Oswiecim, even when discussing WWII events.
However, you will find many things written earlier than that, which refer to the city as Auschwitz-- in English writings. So it’s possible that a standing birthing center in the city, which had nothing to do with the camp, had a low infant mortality, and a zero death rate for a stretch of time long enough to be notable. So there may be a stat floating around about this birthing center that is being misunderstood as a stat about the camp.
I very seriously doubt that Auschwitz the death camp had a birthing center. I don’t even think Theresienstadt had one, and that was the “model” camp that had a school and other facilities for children. It was the camp that the Red Cross was shown, and anyone else curious about camp rumors. Theresienstadt was one of the reasons the Allies didn’t know what was really going on until the war was almost over.
Then, if one were merely pursuing truth, one could point out that error without trying to claim that the Holocaust did not happen.
In fact, Dachau was used as an extermination center for Soviet prisoners and the fact that they were shot instead of being gassed does not change the effect of their murder.
The crematorium was used, so references to “ovens” is legitimate. Over 31,000 people were murdered at Dachau in fewer than four years and raising the misstatement of one prosecutor on one technical point in such a charged time seems rather pointless. When raised as some historical truth that casts doubt on the murders of 11 to 12 million people, it looks suspiciously like an attempt to deny that those murders happened.
Gee. David Irving should have hired you to be on his legal team.
This is standard stuff: cherry pick one fact or error, and then try to extrapolate a totally erroneous conclusion based on ignoring other information or by drawing unwarranted conclusions. The Nizkor Project addresses this sort of thing rather well.
For those who would like to see the refutations of most of the above nonsense, a good start is the section on the Techniques of Holocaust Denial, particularly the section on the gas chambers.
Absolutely:
[ul]
[li]Cherry picked data points with conclusions drawn that even those cherry picked claims do not logically support;[/li][li]References to long-debunked claims;[/li][li]Assumptions that errors in reports are deliberate rather than the obvious results of the standard confusion resulting from the fog of war.[/li][/ul]
It goes the way that it has gone since the first Nazi propaganda broadcast in the early 1930s.
For example, from the statement that the extermination camps were not set up on German soil with Wiesenthal’s acknowledgement that that was true you have drawn the utterly unsupported conclusion that that statement casts doubt on the entire process. It does not. You even went so far as to put your bad logic in boldface. Discovering that there were U.S. states in the North that still permitted slavery in 1861 does not mean that slavery was not the prime motive for the South to secede. You need something besides the presence of a common misconception to draw your conclusion and you have nothing but a leap in logic to support it.
Are there errors in the history of the Holocaust, particularly the popular, as opposed to scholarly, accounts where even some scholarly accounts have errors? Of course. No event occurring over multiple years that involved the lives and deaths of tens of millions of people, (whether victims or perpetrators or bystanders), is going to be free of error. I do not know of anyone who has been censored or censured for pointing out that Dachau was not an extermination camp and if it is one’s most cherished desire to make that fact known to the world, I have no interest in silencing such a person, I wish them well in their efforts, and cannot imagine anyone else trying to prevent them from doing so.
On the other hand, making a big deal about those errors in an attempt to deny the Holocaust, generally, looks like nothing so much as a way to play games resulting in an overall denial of an event about which there is no legitimate reason to doubt.
To draw an analogy: Far too many Americans erroneously believe that the U.S. gained its independence when a bunch of backwoods guys went out with longrifles, hid behind trees, and shot at British and Hessian troops lined up in formations, ignoring the facts that von Steuben, Lafayette, and others trained Washington’s troops in European style combat and that France and Spain both contributed materially to the eventual American victory. Those errors regarding the facts of the war do not mean that the U.S. failed to gain independence. Finding inconsistent reports, (and, particularly, repeating bad information, much of it deliberately false), does not indicate that the Nazis were innocent of murdering 11 to 12 million people, roughly half of them Jewish.
Oh, yes. I think almost everyone sees exactly how it goes.
The tactics of Holocaust deniers tend to be as follows: rely on infuriatingly counterfactual statements that are easily refuted by even a cursory glance at the historical record, while smugly proclaiming that only their skewed version of history is accurate.
I do occasionally wonder why Holocaust deniers seem to think it to their benefit to claim that the many deaths from starvation and illness in the concentration camps somehow absolve the Nazis of guilt. No one would dispute that such deaths occurred. But they occurred because the Nazis arrested entire populations and sent them to camps in which conditions were as appalling and deplorable as it would be possible to imagine. And deaths from other causes do not, of course, erase the reality of the gas chambers.
Why not just take the whole thread to the pit. It’s halfway there anyway and responding to the notion I think that jews bring genocide on themselves with “wtf is wrong with you” is not “both sides do it” One statement is FAR more offensive than the other. I think I was incredibly restrained in stopping at something as neutral as “wtf is wrong with you”
The focus of Ahmedenijad’s holocaust denial seems primarily concerned with how the holocaust was used to bolster the argument for a jewish state. If Israel had been formed in Argentina, do you think Ahmedenijad would have much of an opinion about the holocaust one way or the other?
I’d never seen it before, either. It seems to come from accounts by and relating to Stanisława Leszczyńska, who was imprisoned at Auschwitz in April 1943. She was put to work in the maternity ward and ordered to euthanize the newborns. To her credit, she didn’t, and she endeavored to conceal as many as possible. However, before her arrival at Auschwitz, newborns were generally drowned in a barrel, and about 1,500 of the 3,000 live deliveries met the same fate at the hands of another nurse in the maternity ward shortly after their birth. Another 1,000 died of “cold and hunger”. The blue-eyed, Germanic-looking ones were sent away to be placed with German families. As I said earlier, about 30 survived. Cite.
So, it’s more than a little disingenuous to crow about “3,000 live births!” when, after half of those births, “‘…the mothers were able to hear the characteristic gurgle and splashing water’ as their babies were disposed of.”
The thread is not halfway to the Pit and, while some tempers may get bit short, I see no reason to place it where the discussion will be overshadowed by flaring tempers and personal squabbles.
Rather than sending it to The BBQ Pit, I would prefer to simply request that posters not make personal comments and not treat emotional statements as personal attacks.
Further than that, any discussion of moderating may be taken up in ATMB.
[ /Moderating ]
I may have missed something; why do we care what one former PM said?
Interesting, and I can see it being yet another application of the denier’s “lying by specificity”, i.e. there always a qualifier added or implied that might make the statement technically true but also effectively meaningless.
Repeatedly saying “there were no death camps in Germany”, for example, when the death camps were actually in Poland and elsewhere. Technically true, but so what? Saying there were 3000 live births at Auschwitz might be technically true, if one deliberately fails to mention the immediate infanticides and the infants who avoid being murdered but soon died of exposure or illness brought on by being in a concentration camp run by guards indifferent to the infants’ well-being. They were alive when they born and that is all that counts.
I’ll wager we could kept asking a denier about these points and if he responds, it’ll always be with the same carefully-chosen phrasing: “There were no death camps in Germany” and “There were 3000 live births period.” Disingenuity is how a poor thought process protects itself.
If one is in mind to be technical, both Auschwitz and Chelmno were established in territory annexed by Germany after the conquest of Poland, so they were both in territory recognized as part of Germany by Germans at the time.
Ah, but if we operate on the established concept that there were no death camps in Germany, it follows, ipso facto, that Auschwitz and Chelmno were not extermination camps, quod erat demonstrandum e pluribus unum.
I’d also point out that we have confirmation of the gassings from people who were at Auschwitz, including guards. From the diary of Dr. Kramer, a doctor and member of the SS, written while he was there:
My note: “Musselman” (Muslim) was camp slang for prisoners who were weak or had given up hope/their will to live.)
Would that it were true. But unfortunately it is only wishful thinking. Unfortunately.
Your philosemitism is a shining example to us all. I can see that you are trying to convince yourself that none of these atrocities happened because the world is a brighter, happier place if that evil never was.