this may be end up in Great Debates, but I figured I’d put it here since I’m looking more for actual answers than any real debates.
I’ve heard of people (never met any), who deny the existence of the Holocaust. Can anybody tell me exactly why people beleive this? or at least, THEIR reasoning for it?
Perhaps I’m mistaken, and they are just disputing certain facts, not the Holocaust itself? Just curious, as this belief makes no sense to me
In Why People Believe Weird Things it is explained that they don’t deny the holocaust. They deny that Hitler ordered it, that the numbers were so high (they give numbers in the hundreds-of-thousands), and that it was a deliberate policy (saying that it was a last minute thing).
I’d recommend the book for both an explantation of the position and an extended refutation.
The usual argument is that the camps existed, but they weren’t set up to be murder factories and the deaths were due to things like starvation and disease, not to any plan on the part of the Nazis.
The reasoning? Some of it isn’t reasoning – the idea of that many people being killed is so unbelieveable that they can’t believe it.
Also, there’s an interesting phenomenon: if you keep harping on how evil someone is, people begin to think, “How could he be that bad?” and begin to look for ways to justify what was done. (It’s an interesting technique in fiction – if your characters badmouth a character, when that character finally shows up, the reader is likely to feel sympathy.)
The revisionist interpretation is usually the following :
-The number of victims is largely overestimated.
-The third reich policies might have been strongly antisemitic, but there was no deliberate will to exterminate the Jews. No such plans.
-There were concentration camps, but there wasn’t such a thing as an extermination camp. For instance, there wasn’t any gas chamber. The high mortality rate is related to lack of food, diseases, etc…like for instance in the prisonner camps where russians soldiers were interned.
Some Holocaust deniers are white supremacists who believe that the there is a conspiracy of Jews to are trying to take over the world, part of that plan is to repress whites. They see the Holocaust as another hoax perpetrated by the Jews to further their alleged megalomaniacal agenda. Here’s the full article from which I got this from: http://skepdic.com/nazism.html
Here’s a review on a book that specifically deals with Holocaust deniers: http://atheism.about.com/library/books/full/aafprDenyHistory.htm
thanks for the info, everyone! I’d like to get book Why People Believe Weird Things, it sounds like something I’d be interested in even aside from the Holocaust information.
This is very interesting. None of the replies so far address the OP at all!
The original core of Holocaust Deniers are obviously pro-Nazi/anti-semitic types. Then there are just plain stupid people who are unable to think for themselves and are easily persuaded who got caught up it in. The former are people whose beliefs are not capable of being swayed by facts. The latter are not all that different from people who think that ducks’ quacks don’t echo or that rice at weddings kills birds. One thing that’s very important to understand about the latter group is that they are extremely easy to dupe since they believe that they cannot be duped! They really think they can magically tell truth from lies and once they decide something is true, they are virtually impossible to persuade otherwise.
For a given denier, it is quite hard to tell which group they belong in since obviously the denier will disclaim being pro-Nazi/anit-semitic.
I have to second the recommendation of that book. I own a copy, and I found it very interesting. A good read.
How do they justify their beleifs, though? Do they cite “facts” that “prove” there was no Holocaust, or do they simply say that millions of people around the world are either lying or stupid for beleiving that it happened? I understand that they deny the existence of the Holocaust and / or certain facts (ie, number of deaths, etc) involved because “well, obviously the Jews made it up, the liars! See, we were right all along!” However, do they offer any kind of proof, however dubious it may be to others? If so, what kind of “proof”? I do find it hard to beleive that people would beleive this with NO logical reason whatsoever (though maybe I’m giving too much credit to such a group of people).
I guess I ask because I, personally, can’t think of any reason why somebody would deny the existence of such a huge even as the Holocaust.
Haulocaust denial is nothing more than a conspiracy theory. In order to believe it, you must accept the unprovable allogations of a bunch of rabid anti-semites over the literal tons of rock-solid evidence clearly proving to all rational people that the Haulocaust did indeed happen. You must accept that the thousands of death camp survivors are all lying or unqualified as witnesses. You must accept that the Nazi guards and officials who survived and later provided testimony were all lying. You must accept that the mountains of photographs and written records kept by the Nazis are all forgeries.
Why would anyone go so far out of their way to believe a lie? It all stems from a desire to paint Hitler’s regime as something less than the paragon of evil most people agree it was.
It’s not so much that they think they have “proof”, it’s that they, like creationists, nitpick at the established facts of the holocaust, and when they find one inconsistency, they claim they’ve proved it never happened. They make the logical leap of “you claim 6 million killed, but they said it was only 5 million in 1982” to “it never happened at all”.
You pretty much hit the nail on the head. The idea goes that since The Jew (ironic sidenote: “The Jew” has become a compliment in my circle, given to the Jewish 'mongst us, a la “You’re The Jew, yo!”) controls everything, clearly they invented the Holocaust thing to discredit the Nazis, that “got it right” in their plan to put The Jew down.
Why People Believe Weird Things is a good intro to this and other topics, but for a book length treatment I’d take a look at Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory by Deborah E. Lipstadt
For an interesting look at one aspect of Holocaust denial, see Errol Morris’s documentary Mr. Death: The Rise and Fall of Fred A. Leuchter, Jr.. Leuchter is an engineer who designed execution devices and became a Holocaust denier when some bigwigs in the movement hired him to use his technical expertise in support of their cause. It’s a really fascinating movie, and gives some idea of the kinds of things deniers use as “proof.”
There are actually several different types of Holocaust denial that each have different motivations.
As noted above, many people simply cannot believe that 11,000,000 to 12,000,000 people could be exterminated by a deliberate policy. The enormity is too great. It is especially dreadful to contemplate that roughly 5.8 million of those persons were deliberately killed simply because they were Jewish. These people do not neceassarily have any bias against Jews or the Rom or any other group; they simply cannot believe something so terrible could have occurred.
Others believe that many deaths might have occurred, but that the numbers are exaggerated and/or that the identification of the people who were killed has been manipulated. (Such views are frequently tainted by an anti-Jewish bias and are held by people who were simply raised to doubt the numbers because of the Jewish association with the event.)
Finally, one group holds that the entire “story” is a “Jewish plot” to garner sympathy for the Jewish people. People in this group are quite capable of holding the contradictory positions that nothing actually happened while simultaneously expressing the thought that “the Jews got what they deserved.”
There is a fourth group that I really do not understand, myself. This would include people (such as the historian David Irving) who did not seem to demonstrate any overt anti-Jewish bias in their earlier works, yet came to such odd conclusions (defying both evidence and logic) that it would appear that only such an anti-Jewish bias could have propelled their efforts. Irving, for example, started out with more of a defense of Hilter than an attack on the reality of the Holocaust, claiming he could find no evidence that Hitler actually ordered the murders. In his later defenses of his strange belief, he came to demonstrate a clear anti-Jewish subtext, but it is not completely clear whether he always felt that way or whether he developed that attitude because he believed that “Jews” were attacking his work. (Actually, his work was “attacked” by most serious scholars.)
The Nizkor Project addresses Holocaust denial, although most of its information exposes “how” rather than considering “why.”
No, they don’t necessarily just say “I don’t buy it, so it never happened”. There are skilled scholars amongst the revisionists.
But the facts about the holocaust aren’t as clear-cut as might think. It’s not as easy as you might believe to prove that a particular thing happened.
For instance, there are no perfectly accurate data about the number of people who died. If you scramble the datas in a given way, you can end up with a figure for a camp which isn’t that dissimilar to the fatality rate in a russian prisonner camp, for instance, then attribute the deaths to poor treatments, lack of food, diseases, etc… (and indeed many Jews died from such causes).
Second example : the will of the nazis leaders to implement the final solution. They didn’t claim it all over the place. They never printed it in the newspapers. They didn’t write down dozen of documents ordering to implement it. They didn’t pass a law stating “all Jews shall be killed”. There are few material evidences, besides the outcome itself. Few people would have been able to testify that such a decision was deliberatly taken, and those few had a vested interest in not testifying. So, you don’t have to dismiss a mountain of contradictory evidences to state that Hitler never ordered the slaughter of the Jews. Some will suffice.
Another example are the gas chambers. There aren’t blatant, obious, undiscutable proofs lying all over that they existed. The main proof are testimonies of the deported. And for obvious reasons, there weren’t many of them.
First step : you discount these testimonies on whatever basis.
Second step : you point out that there isn’t many buildings which could be constructed as having been gas chamber in existence (most had been destroyed)
Third step : for the rare buildings still in existence or which existence is proven (pictures, for instance), you demonstrate that they could have been, and according to you actually have been used for other purposes, like desinfecting clothes, for instance (the Zyklon B original purpose was desinfection). Or/and you demonstrate that they couldn’t have possibly been used to gas people for whatever material reason.
Most people believe that there are obvious and undiscutable proofs of the use of the gas chambers, besides testimonies. But it’s not the case. Ten years ago or so, a book written by a german historian was celebrated precisely because he managed to demonstrate that the Zyklon B was ordered with the deliberate intent to use it to gas people. But it wasn’t an easy task. It took him years of archives and records digging.
Oh! And something I wanted to add :
Negationists/revisionists aren’t necessarily neo-nazis. At the contrary, there are many neo-nazis who don’t state that the Holocaust never happened but instead approve it.
I would tend to think that most negationists are rather conspiracy theorists than neo-nazis. Many do not hold positive view of the nazi regime. On the other hand, I doubt one could be at the same time revisionist and not antisemitic because it’s essentially necessary to believe that there’s a big conspiracy favoring the Jews in order to dismiss the holocaust. But since there are so many people with so many weird ideas, I wouldn’t be surprised if one could find a couple revisionists who actually (I mean not only in words but also in thoughts) aren’t antisemitic.
In some cases it’s because their father, Hutton Gibson, tells them it happened that way.
I have read WPBWT (a few years back) but if I recall correctly doseen’t Mr Shermer actually agree to some of this? It was like he was willing to accept that 6million jews died in that area during that time period but only about half of those were actually at the camps where much of the rest was from lack of food, shelter, disease, etc from living in a war torn area of europe. Still a horrific number that in no way diminishes the evil deeds.
Big Note: Leuchter is not an engineer. His claiming to be an engineer is in fact one of the many things that got him into trouble over time.
BTW: At the time I was composing my first post here, maximum_dl@hotmail.com’s etc. post hadn’t shown up. So my first line refers only to those before that one.
Now, back to a third category (which might apply to one or more deniers mentioned in this thread). There’s a certain type of mentally unstable people who believe they are freaking brilliant and that they alone have the capability to do something no ordinary person can. These people look for a “problem” to “solve” and to thus reveal to the world their brilliance. Lee Harvey Oswald was sort of like that, and he believed that killing Kennedy would make him a hero to certain people. I think a small number of deniers are of this ilk. They think “I will prove something that everyone takes for granted to actually be false and become more famous than Einstein!” Since they are mentally unstable, they cannot be deterred from this “righteous path”. If you hang out in certain places, some science Usenet groups for example, you’ll quickly find such people. These are very scary people and all contact (esp. debate) with them should be avoided.