Deniers are considered those who either deny that the Holocaust happened at all, or was at a much smaller scale (eg, only a few thousand and not millions). Some have Neo Nazi/Anti-Semite connections (like Erst Zuendel) and some don’t (like David Cole, who while Jewish considers himself to be an Atheist.).
Revisionists are (I think) historians who are investigating stories like with the human fat soap and skin lampshades for their historical accuracy, as well as clearing up occasional inaccuracies, such as how it is now known that gas chambers weren’t used at Dachau to kill prisoners (I think, Shermer mentions it and I can’t remember precisely).
At least, that’s how I’ve taken it.
BTW: the current official figure for the number of Jews to have died in the Halocaust is 5-6 million, not 6.5 million.
Er, Spanky, the traditional revisionist claim is that only 300,000 Jews died in the Holocaust (see: IHR, CODOH, Zuendelsite). That’s hardly “pointing out inaccuracies,” they’re pseudo-historical claims. However, in his latent age, David Irving has admitted that “as many as 4 million Jews” may have perished.
This statement puzzles me. I’m now looking at a photo that I took at the Dachau camp in the late summer of 1945. There was a moderately sized building with several doors in the end. These doors faced a large open space in front of the building. Inside were several rooms, with nozzles in the ceiling, that ran the length of the building. At the other end of these rooms was another door one the outside of which, as my photo shows, had stenciled on it a skull and crossbones and a warning in German. The building was still preserved at the camp when I visited there in 1960.
Quite obviously some kind of poison was in the building that the guards didn’t care to have people who came in the front doors know about, but about which those at the rear doors were warned.
That building was a gas chamber for something. If it wasn’t to kill prisoners, what do you suppose was its purpose?
Not to sound like a denier, but no one was ever gassed en masse at Dachau. The gas chambers at Dachau were used primarily to delouse clothing in an effort to prevent typhus (which deniers sometimes use as an example of the ‘Nazi hospitality’, oddly). That said, some people were indeed gassed at Dachau, though their number don’t exceed five hundred IIRC. The people gassed there were gassed experimentally, and they tested many different types of poisons there, IIRC.
Shermer seems to differentiate between the two in “Why People Weird Things”. He calls the people who use the standard self-correcting practice of revising data based on new evidence “revisionists”, and the people who use psuedoscience to make unsupported claims “deniers”.
In any case, that’s how I’ve been using the terms in this thread. Since there doesn’t seem to be agreement on these terms, I will be more clear what I mean in the future.
I didn’t think that anyone was. Getting to the truth about anything is commendable. It’s just that one has to understand that the human soap story is being used by the revisionists to create a strawman that they can tear down as fallacious evidence that the Holocaust has been exaggerated. Hence I react somewhat strongly when it is brought up.
When you do a search on Google on the words ‘Jewish’ and ‘human soap’ almost all the sites you get - except Nizkor - are revisionist sites like Zundelsite, white supremacist sites and other such garbage.
Since I agree that the truth is important I’ll take the time to go through some of the things thus far said going back mainly to Nizkor as cited by KarlGauss early in the thread. I know that most of this has been answered in some way, but since the same remarks still turn up after those posts, I’ll make somewhat of a summary of what we have thus far.
Eh? Actually those three statements are exactly what the Nizkor site refutes. Their case:
[ol][li]None of the serious historians ever claimed that human soap was made on an industrial scale.[/li][li]Nizkor provides a picture of allegedly human soap used as evidence at Nuremberg,.[/li][li]There is evidence of human soap being made on a limited experimental scale and this evidence is not based on rumors.[/ol]Once again: the revisionists are using the exaggerated rumor regarding human soap manufacturing as a strawman to argue against the Holocaust’s enormity. Nizkor sets the record straight on this issue. For what it’s worth there is a jar of soap very similar to the ones on the photo on display at the Dachau Memorial Museum.[/li][quote] revtim
I discussed this issue with a Jewish friend of mine, he also never saw any soap or lampshades in any of the Holocaust museums he’s visited
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As for soap see above. Pieces of furniture made from human remains including the atrocious lampshades are on display at both the Dachau Memorial Museum as well as in Auschwitz.
No. Read the Nizkor site. As they show this springs from a misconception that the readily available wartime soap marked with R.I.F. would mean ‘Reines Iuden Fett’, when in fact it is an acronym for the manufacturing institute ‘Reichsstelle für Industrielle Fettversorgung’.
The estimates still vary. The average serious counts land you somewhere in the area of 10-12 million total Holocaust victims. Jewish victims are estimated at 5-7 million, with 5.9 million excluding a large number of newborn infants being the most often cited figure. Poles, Roma, Russians, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Homosexuals, political dissidents, and so on account for at least 5 million.
The Gas chamber at Dachau was used very little as Daoloth points out, it was built out of a de-liceing chamber as a prototype for the larger gas chambers that would follow elsewhere.
The methods of murder at Dachau were indeed most often shooting, injection of poison, or hanging. Dachau was also the scene for some of the most horrific experiments on humans since the German arms industry used it as a test facility, hence a large number of victims died as a result of those experiments.
David Simmons, they have renovated Dachau since you were there, They have rebuilt two of the barracks and raised a large memorial to the victims. The camp HQ now houses the exhibition I refer to further up. You’ll find the Dachau Concentration Camp Memorial Site homepage here.
This seems to be true. This web site on Dachau Gas Chambers contains a description of the largest of the gas chambers that agrees with my recollection. Ergo, it must be genuine, heh heh. Apparently gassing people en masse isn’t as simple as might be thought and considerable experimentation was needed. Dachau was the first of the camps and apparently never was an extermination camp on the order of Buchenwald, Treblinka, Auschwitz, or the others.
Most of the gas chambers were small and used for delousing, and I saw them as well as the bigger one I described that adjoined the crematorium and was used, I guess, for experimentation and some limited extermination. It would seem that that vast majority of deaths at Dachau were from being worked to death while undernourished.
It it still amazing that one of the most cultured societies in Europe could have done such things, and the banality of the explanations given by the ordinary people who ran the camps from day to day was stunning.
Was Buchenwald an extermination camp? My grandfather (a Dutch communist) was imprisoned there, and I was under the impression (from my mother) that he was going to be sent to a different camp to be killed, when the war ended.
Buchenwald was not planned as an extermination camp, it was a forced labor camp. In the autumn of 1944 it did however turn into one of Holocaust’s worst scenes for mass murder. In 1945 the death marches that followed the ‘evacuation’ of Auschwitz had Buchenwald as one of the destination goals. It is fairly probable that the SS intended to use it as an extermination camp, had the war not ended before they had time to do that.
Sparc, do you know if the soap you referenced had ever been tested? Shermer states that no soap has ever tested positive for human remains, but I wonder how much of it had been tested at all, and even when the technology became available to perform such a test.
Actually, I wonder what the test Shermer refers to looks for. If it’s looking for human DNA, clearly this type of test would only be possible in the last few decades or so, not during the Nuremburg trials. Does anyone now what testing methods might have been available in the timeframe of the Nuremburg trials, if any?
Sorry, but I don’t know. The whole issue was sort of a non-issue from the end of the Nuremberg trials up until the revisionists started building strawmen out of it and conmen attempting to sell human soap started showing up. I’ll try to find out, but it might take a while.
If I remember right, when my grandmother made soap at home, it was from animal fat, and lye. Wouldn’t any possible DNA be damaged or made unusable from the lye’s caustic properties? Is there another way they’d be able to tell if there were human remains used in the making of the soap?
