Please feel free to move this to general questions if you think its more appropriate.
I have an acquaintance that has started hanging out with the wrong people and he is starting to say crazy stuff like “the holocaust ONLY killed a million Jews”
BTW, is there an antisemetic strain in Libertarianism? On the one hand he is one of those Ayn Randians and on the other hand I thought Ayn Rand was Jewish.
How do I prove the number of Holocaust victims to him?
You can’t. People who deny the Holocaust don’t do it through innocent ignorance, but through willful ignorance and malice. No matter what evidence you provide, he won’t believe you, because he’s chosen not to believe you.
I’ve never heard of someone denying 5/6ths of the Holocaust.
You don’t. You can provide evidence, but he will only accept “proof” if he is open to it.
The “one million” figure is generally a corrupted version of the numbers who died at Auschwitz. It carefully avoids including the deaths at the multiple other death camps and the deaths at the labor camps and the deaths that resulted from the actions of the Einsaztgruppen.
At the end of the war, several separate agencies attempted to discover the number of Jews who had died at the hands of the Nazis. They tended to use (incomplete) census reports from prior to the war and compared them to censuses taken of survivors at locations where some Jews survived or in Displaced Persons camps. The various attempts came up with figures ranging from 5.3 million to 5.85 million Jewish deaths, (since rounded in popular literature to 6 million), and a similar number of total deaths for Rom plus Slavs plus assorted civilians of subject countries.
Since then, the Holocaust deniers have tended to seize on thenumbers for Auschwitz, (as if that were the only death camp), and ignore all the other ways that the Nazis murdered people.
A good source for responses to denier idiocy and deliberate lies is the Nizkor Project at www.nizkor.org/.
This could probably go into GQ, but I’ll leave it here for a bit to see whether we get posts from a denier or if some other “debate” breaks out, so that the GQ Mods don’t have to send it back.
[ /Modding ]
AFAIK you can’t because we don’t know.
6 million is a good, rough figure, but there a decent arguments (I’m told by people more learned than me), for saying that a lower figure of 5 million or 4.5 million might be more accurate, but that the ‘real’ answer is probably 4-6 million.
The thing is, if he is using a figure as low as 1 million, then that means a load of Jews suddenly vanished - there are about 4 million Jews missing based on census records alone. There is no way that only 1 million died (and tbh I find the difference between 5 and 6 million to be largely academic) - there isn’t even any credible argument to be made for so low a figure.
I have. David Irving in particular downplays the number of Jews killed, at various times claiming a million or so casualties as a result of disease, starvation, allied bombing, etc. i.e. the expected hardships of war itself, and not a systematic effort by Germany at extermination.
Yad Vashem a good place to look for information. They don’t pick a specific number since all such are only estimates. An additional factor not necessarily included in estimates are the number of Jews killed among Soviet POWs.
You may not be able to prove a specific number of Jews that were killed, but it shouldn’t difficult to establish that the number is far greater than 1 million.
As far as an anti-semitic strain of Libertariansim, there is a strain of everything in there. The hardest thing to find among that group these days are liberatarians.
On further reading, I see that David Irving in 1995 conceded at least four million Jewish casualties, but again through disease and privation, not systematic murder. It looks to me like he’s gradually and grudgingly increased his estimates as his lowball numbers are challenged, but won’t abandon his fiction as to causes.
So killing only one million people is less bad?
It’s not that there’s an antisemitic strain in Libertarianism, it’s that there’s a Libertarian strain in antisemitism. Many (Western) holocaust denial types are extreme right-wing anti-government types, so some of them have drifted into the Libertarian party as a compromise because it’s the largest party that comes close to supporting their anti-government views.
Isn’t it? I mean, it’s a travesty and a genocide whether it’s one or six million, but I don’t think it’s wrong to say that in general, it’s worse to kill more people than fewer.
It’s a multi-layered argument.
First, a lower figure can supposedly show that there was no intentional murders - it was just poor living conditions with only a slightly higher than normal deathrate.
Second, a lower figure is used to discredit Holocaust recorders. It accuses Holocaust recorders are lying with exagerrated figures. It supposedly shows that they’re asking for special attention when there were numerous other historical events at the some level.
Think “That’s the way the Jews work. A million Jews die during a war. Lots of people died during World War II but they don’t ask for any special favors. But the Jews use their media connections to claim it was six million people. And then they get handed their own country.”
It’s curious that the people who most fervently downplay the Holocaust as a conspiracy theory (as opposed to academic nitpicking) are the same ones who would most wish for such an event to occur. It’d be like if the KKK claimed slavery never happened.
Not all of the six million were Jewish. At least, I think not; correct me if I’m wrong. I’ve been told that the gay-rights pink triangle was reclaimed, so to speak, by homosexuals because that was the symbol they had to wear in the camps. I could be wrong about that, and I could be wrong in believing that disabled people were also sent to the camps because they didn’t fit into the Master Race. And political dissenters, and perhaps Gypsies, who are always persecuted…I could be wrong.
No. Not all of the** twelve million** (give or take) were Jewish. Only 6 million were. The rest were gay, Rom, Slav, Black or disabled.
I see. Thank you.
Also, :eek:
The Einstazgruppen alone killed at least that many people, before the extermination camps were even established; just gangs of German SS men, Gestapo, and ordinary police (assisted by local collaborators) who roamed around Nazi-occupied areas of the Soviet Union shooting people the Nazis deemed undesirable. This included Communist party officials and sometimes persons who were allegedly partisans or saboteurs; but as their own reports (captured after the war) flatly stated, they shot thousands and tens of thousands of people at a time simply because they were Jews. The “Operational Situation Reports” linked to on those pages above are chillingly matter-of-fact about this.
Damuri Ajashi, does your acquaintance for some reason accept the reality of the Einsatzgruppen, but think Auschwitz (and Treblinka and Sobibor and the others) were myths?
Definitely. I’m a libertarian and fervent antisemite. But I have a black friend so it’s OK.
It’s sad to see that such evil echoes to this day.
I recently found that my family have a personal connection with the holocaust.
Killing 1 million is hardly less evil than killing 6 million. Was he using this as some kind of justification for “Hitler not being as evil as people say” or something?