# Revisionist or facts?

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/revisionist-or-facts/59514>\
**Category:** Factual Questions\
**Created:** [March 26, 2001, 7:56am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/revisionist-or-facts/59514 "2001-03-26T07:56:51Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 2\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![rngadam](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/97f17d/32.png) [@rngadam](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/rngadam)\
**Post date:** [March 26, 2001, 7:56am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/revisionist-or-facts/59514/1 "2001-03-26T07:56:51Z")

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From: [http://members.iinet.net.au/~gduncan/facts.html](http://members.iinet.net.au/~gduncan/facts.html) . The page contains a long list of interesting tidbits (I bet a lots of those could be debunked too!) about WWII, but I kind of jumped when I read the following. Is this true or some kind of revisionist? I doubt the author would write up such a long page just to pass on these and I can’t really verify these by myself. Oh well, that’s what happens when you don’t know your world’s history I guess!

> [@](#):
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> Fake?. In Germany it is a criminal offence to deny the existence of the gas chambers. In 1993, one well known author and historian was fined 30,000 Deutschmarks for stating that the gas chamber shown to tourists at Auschwitz is a fake. In fact it was constructed on Polish Communist Government orders three years after the war ended, the original having been destroyed. Poland admitted the fact in January, 1995.

> [@](#):
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> Wrong. The concentration camp at Dachau was not an extermination camp such as Treblinka or Auschwitz. The so called ‘gas chambers’ in Dachau were used for fumigating prisoners clothes to reduce the incidence of typhus. American photographs, released to the world’s press in 1945 wrongly captioned the pictures as ‘gas chambers’. Later, the forensic pathologist, Dr.Charles P. Larson, carried out tests on over 50 bodies discovered in a mass grave at the camp. None were found to be gassed but had died from malnutrition, typhus, hangings and shootings etc.

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**Author:** ![Moonshine](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/5e9695/32.png) [@Moonshine](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Moonshine)\
**Post date:** [March 26, 2001, 8:35am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/revisionist-or-facts/59514/2 "2001-03-26T08:35:23Z")

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I’ll start this post off by stating quite clearly that I am not a revisionist or holocaust denier or anything of that ilk; denying the holocaust is like saying the earth is flat.

Having said that, I have been to Dachau and it is true that THOSE chambers weren’t execution chambers, they really were just showers. Dachau was mainly a holding camp to keep prisoners before moving them on to the concentration camps, rather than an end destination. As such the showers were for hygene purposes and the ‘ovens’ are actually just crematoria. If you’ve seen them you’ll know immediately that they are way to small to have played a significant role in Hitler’s Final Solution. However, this is in no way to say that there weren’t plenty of the other sort of camps, showers and ovens around in other camps.

BTW, holocaust denial is indeed a crime in Germany, as is making the Hitler salute and a number of other gestures and affiliations associated with the Third Reich.