That’s the basic reason the camps were created. Mowing down hundreds or thousands of people was traumatic for the soldiers, so they came up with something more mechanized that worked on a larger scale.
Gack: Do you believe that the mentally handicapped were killed by gassing as a result of Nazi programs in Germany? Do you doubt that the T4 Program existed? Why or why not?
That’s what I understand to be the reason for the creation of the death camps.
Wiki says: link (bolding mine)
But that bolded statement does not have a cite reference. I was hoping to see one.
I don’t have one for the gunning down method, but in William Shirer’s Rise and Fall of the Third Reich it does report that drivers of “gas vans” that killed the occupants by exhaust fumes reported stress and headaches, although whether the headaches were due to killing and hauling dead bodies or from stray gas fumes I’m not sure.
Nazi sympathizer and Holocaust denier continues to sympathize and deny. How pathetic.
If I could believe that Gack’s views were due to abject ignorance on the subject, I’d manage to gather the minimum quanta of pity for him. As we’re on to almost 15 pages and about 700 posts with nothing from him but the continuation of the same vile unapologetic poison, the only thing that he deserves at this point IMO is utter contempt and derision.
To those who have stuck with this and have countered Gack’s denial with evidence upon evidence at every turn - you may truly have cast pearls before swine, but you are certainly better men/women than I.
Having now read this thread in its entirety and the eight-page thread from 2008 that was linked to elsewhere, it’s simply astounding the degree to which almost every single talking point our subject here has used was also used there, word for word, from “typhus outbreak” to “you need a body and a weapon” to “secret Bad Arolsen records” to “the gas chamber door has a window in it” and so on.
I guess it just goes to show how much Holocaust denial really is like creationism. There’s no actual research involved, just a canon of talking points that its proponents spout at infinitum at the hope of winning over people who don’t know any better, and which they never acknowledge any error in.
The bolded statement is referenced extensively in any of the standard (and meticulously referenced) works on The Holocaust e.g. Gilbert or Friedlander.
What, you’ve forgotten the photos already? I am only halfway down the list?
I’m now following 3 lines, the quote above, Lithuania, and the remaining photos.
The link you gave is to a letter to Irving, so I tried to find Irving’s response and came up with this instead, which is even better and quite remarkable … it recounts Irving’s role in bringing both Goebble’s and Eichmann’s papers to the public. He does discuss the quote above, it’s only a small part of the paper, as follows …
First, some pretzel logic …
*Well, if we look just at that sentence, we can say that you’ve only got to change one or two words and you get a completely different meaning. If it wasn’t “The Führer has ordered the physische Vernichtung [physical destruction], of the Jews,” but rather “die Ausrottung des Judentums,” you’ve only changed the words by a fraction and yet you’ve got a totally different meaning. You get something which is much more similar to Adolf Hitler’s public utterances and speeches. Ausrottung des Judentums, the destruction of Judaism, is something totally different. You don’t do that by gas chambers and the machine gun, any more than destroying Christianity or destroying usury can be done by the gas chamber and the bullet. They’re different concepts.
*
… but the fact is that Eichmann was recalling a conversation from 30(?) years past so maybe Irving is right. And here is the overriding thing to consider …
- It’s immaterial, one way or the other, because we must never overlook one basic fact: this is a postwar document, and any historian can now confirm that nowhere in all the archives of the world has yet been found one wartime document referring to a Führer’s order to destroy the Jews, or for that matter, one wartime document referring to gas chambers or gassings. All the documents that refer to Führer orders and gas chambers are postwar documents; statements by people in the dock at Nuremberg, memoirs written by the commandant at Krakow in Poland, and the like. You can’t overlook this basic watershed between wartime and postwar documents. If there’s no wartime document that says there was a Führer order, if no wartime document talks of gas chambers, then there has to be some explanation for that. *
And here is the basic absurdity - being forced to rely on a recalled conversation from 30 years past by a 70 year old man to prove that the Nazis tried to exterminate the Jews. It can’t get any more absurd than that.
There’s one huge difference between creationists and holocaust deniers though. Creationists actually believe the Earth is only 10,000 years old and at worst are guilty of willful stupidity in trying to make reality jibe with their interpretation of the bible. Holocaust deniers, including Gack here, know full well that the holocaust happened. It is impossible to do any research on the subject, sift through the mountains of evidence to find these talking points and not have actually seen that mountain of evidence of mass murder while digging for bullshit to spout. Holocaust deniers know that the holocaust actually happened but lie about it because it suits their own racist, Nazi sympathizing agenda.
There were hundreds of photos- you’re not close to halfway done with them… and you’ve refuted none of these “lines” anyway.
So what? If we changed just a few of the words to “Hitler has ordered all the Jews to be given candy” then it means something different. I think you’re making a joke here.
We have wartime documents (such as the Jaeger report and Goebbels’ diary), and we also have much better than this- we have Himmler’s recorded statements, confirmed to be Himmler’s voice. And “Ausrotten” does not mean “evacuate”, it means “exterminate” or “eradicate”. Talk to a native German speaker (like my grandmother) and they will tell you… denialist frauds never make this argument when native German speakers are present.
Eichmann was 54 when his trial began. He was recalling a conversation from 20 years earlier - and the conversation was about the type of thing you never forget.
I ask again, Gack: Do you believe that the mentally handicapped were killed by gassing as a result of Nazi programs in Germany? Do you doubt that the T4 Program existed? Why or why not?
If you don’t like Eichmann’s testimony, or Speer’s, then what about Himmler’s voice and Goebbels’ diary? Don’t change the words, or pretend they mean something else- they are very clear… extermination of the Jews, elimination of the women and children, etc… Himmler and Goebbels were quite clear.
Or the Höfle Telegram or Korherr Report.
Don’t rush him. He’s enjoying them.
Thanks for the info. I just ordered one of Friedlander’s books. I suspect it will be grim reading.
At this point, I think it’s clear where Gack stands on the issue.
But I figure it’s worth pursuing because some other person who is genuinely misinformed may read this thread someday and I think it’s important to refute Holocaust deniers and show how weak their arguments are.
I agree, but I think 15 pages is quite enough. Gack’s dodging, misdirection, and outright ignoring any actual evidence has become more pathetic. Ignorance has been successfully fought with other people who might read this thread, but Gack is a lost cause. His recent arguments have me repeating his own statement in post #707: “It can’t get any more absurd than that.”
Extending the highjack for just a moment, there is actually a class of creationist, very notably including certain of the most highly prominent published mavens in the field, who know full well that they are lying, but continue to do so anyway, because they feel the cause is more important than the truth.
And, alas, the “common man” variety of Holocaust denier may actually be so uneducated as not to know. He only parrots what he heard his Uncle Ralph say. When photographs are on display, he doesn’t look.
Both classes are mixed, with “passive believers” who simply never examine the evidence at all, and deliberate liars who go around and lecture anyone who will listen, repeating the same falsehoods no matter how many times debunked.
I don’t think this is quite true. It’s more that the “Truth” 
is more important than mere facts. And certainly some of us are on record that we trust hard facts over personal truths for this very reason.
Certainly, Gack’s reaction is to insist that his version of the truth of the Holocaust somehow rises above all the hard evidence.
And you were wrong. (You were absolutely wrong regarding Romania, a point from which you have run in silence.) While some Lithuanians acted on their own, (although under the direct encouragement of Nazi propaganda), both Einsatzkommmando 3 and Einsatzkommando 9 were active in Lithuania. Those outfits were not sitting on the sidelines cheering on the Lithuanians, they were actively carrying out their own exterminations.
As I noted, you are beginning to look less and less as though you have any interest in discovering the truth. When evidence is presented, you dismiss it. When your arguments are disproven, you “move on” without acknowledging that your citations and logic failed. When someone finds genuine information, you run out and find a citation that focuses on minor incidents while ignoring the greater information.