The holocaust is a hoax ....

[spoike]

OP, you seem to be really caught up in the glass windows thing, so I went looking. Lo and behold, I found these pictures of modern day gas chambers. Do you know what all those pictures of gas chambers (each from a different state) have in common? Windows!

I’m gonna go out on a limb here and guess that perhaps they were used by witnesses.

[BrainGlutton]

@Allan_Gurfinkle

It involves recognizing the Palestinians as people who have as much right if not more to be in Israel then the Israelis, unifying the territories, and having elections in all of Palestine.

Like they did in South Africa. It worked there.

I agree entirely, but that’s got nothing to do with this.

[Enola_Gay]

@BrainGlutton

American GI? Auschwitz was liberated by the Soviet Army.

I stand corrected, it was Buchenwald…

[BrainGlutton]

So, Gurfinkle, who perpetrated this hoax?

[Whack-a-Mole]

@Allan_Gurfinkle

There is clearly a mind boggling hoax involved. At Auschwitz the guides lead people through the room with the unsealed office doors, one with a plate glass window, and tell them that it was used to gas Jews. The only sane response to such an absurdity is to laugh out loud. No one does. This is a simple, irrefutable, FACT.

The same thing happens at Majdanek, except that here the window is in the wall, not the door.

It is beyond my imagination. It shows how completely gullible people can be when sufficiently conditioned.

The Master speaks:

Another popular claim from deniers is that the gas chambers were only used for delousing. They try to back this with all sorts of nonsense, such as chemical tests for cyanide that fail to differentiate between the outside and inside of a gas chamber brick that had been exposed to the elements for decades. Or saying that a chamber couldn’t have been used to execute people because the door doesn’t lock, forgetting to mention that the door in question is a replacement, and that the original, lock and all, is now in a museum.

SOURCE: Is there any factual basis for Holocaust denial? - The Straight Dope

And for good measure from the same link as above:

Holocaust deniers use a wide variety of claims to try to back up their version of history. Their thinking seems to be that if they can poke a hole in one small area, historical support for the Holocaust will collapse (an attitude they have in common with creationists). But that’s just not the way it works.

Michael Shermer and Alex Grobman describe the way proper historical study works in their recent book, Denying History: Who Says the Holocaust Never Happened and Why Do They Say It? Confirmation of the Holocaust, as with most things in history, comes not from a single fact or document, but through a convergence of many different lines of evidence, just as it does in science. They write, “The Holocaust was a myriad of events in a myriad of places and relies on myriad pieces of data that converge on one conclusion.” So even if a denier can find fault with one small piece of information, or two historians differ in the way they interpret some data, that doesn’t bring all of history crashing down.

The different lines of evidence for the Holocaust include written documentation, eyewitness testimony, photographs, the camps themselves, and population statistics. All of these point inescapably to the conclusion that the horror of the Holocaust really happened.

Interested in your response to how a glass window in a door of what is now a museum, even if you are correct, undoes the whole Holocaust story and brings the mountains of evidence for it to nothing.

Not going to hold my breath waiting though.

[Marley23]

@BrainGlutton

The Master has addressed Holocaust denial more generally.

That’s actually a staff report by David.

@Allan Gurfinkle

Besides, what difference does it make if we call it a reconstruction or a hoax.

Well, there’s the fact that the terms mean entirely different things, but other than that I suppose it’s inconsequential. If the tour guides don’t admit it’s a reconstruction, it’s a failing on their part, but then again the truth obviously isn’t a secret from the public since it’s being discussed here.

[Sampiro]

@Allan_Gurfinkle

Part 1.

I read Weirnik’s “A Year in Treblinka”

Butz’s “Hoax of the Twentieth Century”

Now I think Muller’s book is the clearest example of hoax writing.

That was enough.

Two dissenting books is not enough to make an informed decision challenging the orthodoxy of any complex topic. Speaking of books, how do you account for Mein Kampf, in which Hitler repeatedly refers to Jews as parasites on society who need to be exterminated (admittedly he never says “with insecticide” but it’s pretty clear he won’t be averse to their suddenly dying). Or the Wannsee documents (and the Heydrich letter saying essentially “This is the Wannsee documents where we talked about the Final Solution of the Jewish Problem”- do you believe them to be a forgery?
What about deliberate genocide not involving Zyklon B- do you conced that happened? Do you accept that Jews were murdered en masse by guns wherever the Nazis went or that they (as Albert Speer detailed) were used as slave labor and intentionally given just enough food to keep them useful for a time? Or Oskar Schindler’s statements, or even those of the mistress of Amon Goethe about his almost daily killing of Jews who were moving slowly or who just for any or no provocation pissed him off? And if you do accept these things (and too many others to list) why is it difficult to believe they used gassing? And if not, what happened to the “victims” (i.e. why did Anne Frank’s father return without his wife and children after the war?).

And why were there shower heads in concrete rooms without showers?

[Defensive_Indifference]

Still waiting to hear what happened to the people who were deported? Where’d they go?

Deporting six million people over the course of 12 years works out to about 1369 per day. That’s an average of one troop transport, every single day, for 12 years ferrying people away from Nazi Europe. And no one remebers it? None of them ever got intercepted by the Allies? No contemporary newspapers mention it?

[Enola_Gay]

Originally Posted by Marley23
I suppose this is an unnecessary emotional appeal, but my grandfather was one of the first U.S. soldiers to see Auschwitz, I’m told. He was also Jewish. He didn’t talk about it much, and never to me, but the notion he was either fooled or lying is more than a little objectionable. I’m left to imagine how he would’ve objected to it.

Originally posted by Brainglutten

American GI? Auschwitz was liberated by the Soviet Army.

Busted, Marley…It appears that your grandfather was just one of the many co-conspirators in this elaborate hoax. Amazing he’s had you going all these years.

[Marley23]

@Allan_Gurfinkle

It involves recognizing the Palestinians as people who have as much right if not more to be in Israel then the Israelis, unifying the territories, and having elections in all of Palestine.

They do. That said, the Israelis are already there, so they can’t have less right to be there than the Palestinians. Anything else is just wishing history didn’t happen.

[Allan_Gurfinkle]

I can’t get the quote mechanism to work now … I want to respond to this statement.
Another popular claim from deniers is that the gas chambers were only used for delousing.

This is one of the most astounding facts about the holocaust. Zyklon was a commercial insecticide used to delouse clothing not only in the camps but throughout much of Europe. The purpose was to prevent the spread of thypus. No serious person questions this.

However, you can search the USHMM web site and never find any mention of this fact.

The delousing chambers still exist at Auschwitz. They are never shown to visitors. They are shown in the Cole video.

The hoax Majdanek gas chamber is such a delousing room. Degesch made special equipment for heating the Zyklon pellets, distributing the gas, and exhausing the room, and the Majdanek room has openings for this equipment.

Because most of the delousing rooms are small, it is never claimed that they were ‘homicidal gas chamber’ (with the exception of Majdanek, and I believe that claim is about to be dropped … the ‘official’ number of deaths at Majdanek was recently dropped from hundreds of thousands to 60-70 thousand and I think it will be reclassisifed as a non-extermination camp)

The ‘popular deniers claim’ is the exact truth.

[XT]

Good grief! 5 pages (so far!) for a guy who hasn’t even laid out his position in more than drive by links and exhortations to go and look at em?? This subject isn’t even worth more than a comment or two.

I don’t know if anyone has linked to this (I haven’t read through the whole thread…just skimmed and rolled my eyes a lot), but here is Wiki’s article on Criticism of Holocaust Denial:

Criticism of methods used by Holocaust deniers

The first argument against the claims of deniers centers upon the methods used to present arguments that the Holocaust never occurred, or that it occurred with far fewer deaths than mainstream historical accounts hold to be true. Critics of deniers, however, say that these claims are based upon flawed research, biased statements, and deliberately falsified evidence.[1] Evidence presented by Holocaust deniers has also failed to stand up to scrutiny in courts of law (see Fred A. Leuchter and David Irving), as well as never meeting the standards of independent peer-reviewed journals. The Nizkor Project, a group opposed to Holocaust denial claims, analyze these claims for instances where the evidence used by Holocaust deniers have been altered or manufactured.

Ken McVay, the founder of the Nizkor Project, described his criticism of the methods of Holocaust deniers in a 1994 interview:

"They'll cite a historical text: 'K.K. Campbell says on page 82 of his famous book that nobody died at Auschwitz.' Then you go to the Library of Congress and look up K.K. Campbell, page 82, and what you find he really said was, 'It was a nice day at Dachau.' They get away with this because they know goddamn well most people don't have time to rush off to the Library of Congress. But people read that and say to themselves, 'Who would lie about such a thing when it's so easy to prove them wrong? They must be telling the truth.'"[2]

Unreasonable burden of proof

Holocaust denial is widely viewed as unreasonable because it fails to adhere to rules for the treatment of evidence, rules that are recognized as basic to rational inquiry.

To support a proposition or allegation, a claimant must offer evidence. The merits of this evidence, and the conclusion it can support, will depend on its nature; for example, hearsay would not normally be considered good evidence, but an eyewitness account would be. A second-hand story would not, but an official, dated and signed document testifying to the alleged incident would be. After evidence has been adduced, the claimant’s case is then considered to have been made, and the evidence can be evaluated. The claimant’s burden of proof has been carried. If an interlocutor would then like to call the claimant’s evidence into question, that interlocutor will have to make a claim of his own — for example, that this or that piece of evidence is a forgery. The burden of proof then shifts to the interlocutor, and the standard of proof will be commensurate with the surety with which the original claim was established. The claimant’s evidence has, prima facie, whatever force it has in virtue of its merit as evidence. The interlocutor cannot simply continue demanding more proof to answer any conceivable skeptical conjecture or hypothetical possibility he can invent to challenge the claimant; this raises the claimant’s burden of proof to an unreasonable level.

In the case of the Holocaust, the survivors, eye witnesses, and historians may collectively be considered the claimants. The prevailing consensus among the informed is that their evidence is overwhelming, and that it proves beyond a reasonable doubt that the Holocaust occurred, and that it occurred as they say it occurred. It is unreasonable to ask the claimants to prove that their evidence is “really real” any more than they already have, unless there is some particular demonstrably credible reason for thinking that it is suspect. If Holocaust deniers would like to cast doubt on this evidence, the burden of proof shifts to them, and they will have a very high standard to meet. They would have to prove, at least with a balance of probabilities, that the greater part of the entire body of evidence attesting to the Holocaust has been fabricated, misrepresented, or misconstrued by thousands upon thousands of critical evaluators. Until they can do that, they have not satisfied the rules for the treatment of evidence recognized to be integral to reason. In the meantime, Holocaust denial will continue to be recognized as an unreasonable position.

All of this makes Holocaust denial different from conspiracy theories generally speaking, since the latter aspire to play by the rules of evidence, but the evidence they adduce is judged poor. Holocaust deniers attempt to set unreasonable standards for evidence, so that they can judge the historian’s evidence as poor. This is why Holocaust deniers portray Holocaust scholarship as a conspiracy theory. Still, Holocaust denial is often accompanied by a conspiracy theory of a different sort, namely that Holocaust scholars are conspiring to depict what the deniers allege to be a fictional event as if it were fact.

Denial as antisemitism

Critics maintain that Holocaust denial is a manifestation of antisemitism.[3]

One example of this is a letter sent by Harold Covington (the leader of the National Socialist White People’s Party). This missive was sent on July 24, 1996 via email to a number of neo-Nazi supporters (many of whom were Holocaust deniers). In this message, Covington explained Holocaust denial in a manner that has been used by its opponents and critics as a definitive answer to the question, “Why do people deny the Holocaust?”

"Take away the Holocaust and what do you have left? Without their precious Holocaust, what are the Jews? Just a grubby little bunch of international bandits and assassins and squatters who have perpetrated the most massive, cynical fraud in human history...I recall seeing a television program on revisionism a few years ago which closed with Deborah Lipstadt making some statement to the effect that: the real purpose of Holocaust revisionism is to make National Socialism an acceptable political alternative again. I normally don't agree with anything a Jew says, but I recall exclaiming, 'Bingo! Got it in one! Give that lady a cigar!'" -- "On Revisionism" by Harold Covington (writing under the pseudonym Winston Smith), NSNet Bulletin #5, July 24, 1996

(with the Kosher comment earlier in the thread I think this one is pretty apt…though I’m certain the OP would say it was a ‘joke’ for us humor impaired)

Criticism of Holocaust denial claims

The second main objection to Holocaust denial is the claims presented by the deniers themselves. This objection arises primarily out of the large quantity of evidence for the existence of the Holocaust. This evidence was well documented by the heavily bureaucratic German government itself. It was further well documented by the Allied forces who entered Germany and its associated Axis states towards the end of World War II. Among the evidence produced was film and stills of the existence of prisoner camps, as well as the testimony of those freed when the camps were entered.

The Holocaust was a massive undertaking that lasted for years across several countries, with its own command and control infrastructure. Although the Nazis made attempts to destroy the evidence of the Holocaust when they could see that their defeat was imminent, they left a large amount of documents relating to the Holocaust.[citation needed] Due to the extremely rapid collapse of the Nazi forces at the end of the war, attempts to destroy evidence in Germany were for the most part unsuccessful.

After their defeat, many tons of documents were recovered, and many thousands of bodies were found not yet completely decomposed, in mass graves near many concentration camps. The physical evidence and the documentary proof included records of train shipments of Jews to the camps, orders for tons of cyanide and other poisons, and the remaining concentration camp structures. There are also extensive records of first-hand testimony from concentration camp survivors.

As a result of the records produced, mainstream historians agree that the Holocaust did, in fact, take place.

Anyway, not going to cite the whole article…it’s worth reading though. The short version though is that there is overwhelming evidence that the events in the Holocaust were real, that they happened. The deniers, like all CT nutballs, use nitpicking, misdirection and outright fabrication to try and make their ‘point’…and pretty much rely on ignorance in order to make their arguments seem plausible to the uninformed (such as themselves).

-XT

[BrainGlutton]

@Allan_Gurfinkle

Another popular claim from deniers is that the gas chambers were only used for delousing.

This is one of the most astounding facts about the holocaust. Zyklon was a commercial insecticide used to delouse clothing not only in the camps but throughout much of Europe. The purpose was to prevent the spread of thypus. No serious person questions this.

Yes, Zyklon B was invented as an insecticide. But it kills people too. The pellets, when exposed to air, release hydrogen cyanide gas. It’s the kind of insecticide you would use to fumigate a termit-infested house – with a big tent and “DANGER KEEP OUT!” signs all around; not the kind of insecticide the exterminator would spray in the corners while everybody in the office continues working. It was used to delouse clothes, not people’s skin.
Once again: Who perpetrated this hoax?

[ivylass]

@BrainGlutton

Once again: Who perpetrated this hoax?

He covered this, I think. The Jews did. Back in World War I. To raise money.

I guess a bake sale was not feasible.

[Marley23]

@Enola_Gay

Busted, Marley…It appears that your grandfather was just one of the many co-conspirators in this elaborate hoax. Amazing he’s had you going all these years.

Look, I’m here in Hawaii with my grandmother, she’s very sick, and-

Uh-oh.

Seriously, though (I wouldn’t usually bother with this correction, but given what we’re dealing with here I think it’s worthwhile): I didn’t say my grandfather took part in the liberation of Auschwitz. I was never told that. As I’ve posted a few times elsewhere, he was one of the first U.S. soldiers to go in after it was liberated. How much later, I don’t know, but given the timeline of the war it obviously wasn’t long before the war ended. I don’t know what he saw there, and in the remaining 49 years of his life he didn’t talk to his kids about it very often. I never knew about it until after he died in 1994, and I don’t know much else about his military service. But I do know what I’ve said here.

[ivylass]

@Bayard

Still waiting to hear what happened to the people who were deported? Where’d they go?

Deporting six million people over the course of 12 years works out to about 1369 per day. That’s an average of one troop transport, every single day, for 12 years ferrying people away from Nazi Europe. And no one remebers it? None of them ever got intercepted by the Allies? No contemporary newspapers mention it?

This I think is a very telling point and I find it interesting our new Holocaust Denier has not answered it yet.

[XT]

It’s similar to asking where all the shit went on Noah’s arc…not to mention how they got all the animals on it (or just GOT them) in the first place.

I wouldn’t hold my breath for an answer…though it would be perhaps humorous if the OP DID attempt to answer it.

-XT

[Marley23]

@BrainGlutton

Yes, Zyklon B was invented as an insecticide. But it kills people too. The pellets, when exposed to air, release hydrogen cyanide gas.

As was mentioned earlier. There are a ton of half truths in Allan’s posts here, but ‘Zyklon B kills insects’ is a particularly obvious one.

[photopat]

I only just saw the thread a little while ago and don’t have much to add that hasn’t already been screamed into the OP’s ear with no effect, but I have one question. All these Nazi documents that were swept away and hidden and nobody can get to? How do you know about them? Have you been privileged to see them?

[aldiboronti]

I notice that, while accusing the rest of us of evasion, the OP has himself evaded almost every salient point that has been brought up in opposition to his theory. If such facts are inconvenient (and they certainly are for him) he just ignores them and bangs on about his windows again.

In common with others who share his views, he engages in monologue rather than debate.