Holocaust denial

[Aractus]

Two nights ago I was privileged to see the Australian premiere of German Concentration Camps Factual Survey (1945/2014). They did get many of their "facts" wrong, for instance labelling camps such as labelling Dachau an "execution camp" with a gas chamber. And I don't pretend to be an expert on the Holocaust. And even as a layman I don't like hearing that "6 million Jews were systematically killed in concentration camps" because that's a matter of opinion. 5-6 million Jews, and 5 million others, died in concentration camps, and their deaths were due to a combination of starvation, illness, and deliberate killings, all of which are direct results of treatment by the Nazi regime. In the 1930's before WWII Jews and other minorities were targeted and persecuted. There were laws passed restricting what Jews could do, where they could work, and whether they could go to school. Note of course though that women were also restricted in much the same way, however they were not targeted by the Nazi regime to be put into concentration camps and taken out of society entirely as the Jews were.


By most modern estimates from active WWII historians, between 5 to 6 million Jews perished in concentration camps. There was not, at least to my knowledge, any concentration camp that was designed as an "execution camp". Rather, some of them (6 in total) were covertly converted into them. One of the reasons why they didn't need more execution camps is because they moved targeted prisoners from other camps to be executed. It wasn't until January 1942 that the Final Solution policy was formulated. And, I have absolutely no idea on what date the first systematic executions began taking place, but nevertheless they did take place and in 1942 around 2.7 million Jews died in concentration camps. It doesn't take a mathematician to tell you that the intensity of Jewish deaths in 1942 can only be explained if most of those deaths were intentional executions. Besides the systematic executions, the living conditions that they put the Jews and other minorities through in  the ghettoes and concentration camps facilitated the epidemic-like spread of disease, and the limited food they provided resulted in starvation. To many people that amounts to murder as well.

Deniers claim that there is insufficient evidence for the gas chambers, for the systematic executions specifically. That simply isn't true. Forensic testing of suspected gas chambers returned positive results for hydrogen cyanide, there are blueprints for the chambers, and there's other evidence of their existence and intention. Since it was a secretive operation of course there will be conflicting evidence, that's the nature of a secret directive. They also claim that the 6/11 million number is an invention without any evidence to support it. Well, besides the fact that the Nazis tried to hide many of the mass-burial sites, they were malicious record keepers. So the number of graves, the size of the graves, and the number of people per day per camp put into them are all things that were recorded. Those records are then extrapolated with other information, such as witness testimony, to estimate the total number of prisoner deaths. It is inexact, and 1 million Jews as an error-margin seems like quite a lot (20 percent!), historians however are confident that in the future with further examination of the evidence that the number of deaths will be even better understood and able to be brought to a more precise amount. And most of them do not think the number of Jewish deaths will be outside of the current estimates.

[Foxaèr]

Stupid people are going to be stupid.

[downbeatplumb]

Treblinka 2 was designed purely to kill.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treblinka_e...ation_camp

[Aractus]

Stupid people are going to be stupid.

Well not stupid, but misinformed. Take for instance this video:

http://youtu.be/4Yqz4l5DbxU

1. There are pictures of those same ovens that show multiple human remains in them after cremation. So there's photographic evidence that multiple bodies were burned in the crematorium ovens, yet he only shows one picture with makes it look like this wasn't possible.

2. He claims the capability to cremate 2,000 bodies a day is nonsense, and that they would need 50 ovens. Well, from 1943 Auschwitz did in fact have 52 operational crematorium ovens.

3. "Why would they cut the hair?" - well they did, and there were hundreds of sacks of them. There are pictures of them, the British and allied troops saw them and opened them first hand. And the evidence shows they were used by the Nazi's for felt and thread and saved for other future uses.

4. It's true that Dachau did not have a homicidal gas chamber.

5. "There was only 4 million Jews in all of Europe in WWII" - no, there was 9 million. I don't know where he got his 4 million figure from, he doesn't say, and it's up to him to prove his case for it.

6. It's irrelevant that the number of people who died in Auschwitz was about 1.5 million as opposed to the originally reported 4 million. Historians that calculate the total number of people killed in the Holocaust look at all the relevant and current data for all the concentration camps, as well of course as the numbers pertaining to the Jewish populations and other minority populations that were imprisoned in them. In Auschwitz around 90% of the prisoners were Jewish, and that was the case for a number of camps in Poland since the Nazi's had them moved out of the camps in mother Germany and into those ones.

7. He claims that "you would need a thousand people to do that" - well Auschwitz was staffed by around 7000 people; and all the inmates were made to do slave labour including disposing of the bodies of other inmates. In 1943 the prisoner population of Auschwitz was 80,000 people.

8. It's irrelevant that some of the details in eyewitness testimony is wrong. That's always the case, and it's something that is understood now. Just because there are some problems, and some details that are wrong doesn't negate the whole witness testimony, it simply means that you have to look at what witnesses wrote with a critical eye and harmonise the accounts. Same thing police do with witness statements.

Treblinka 2 was designed purely to kill.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treblinka_e...ation_camp

Fair enough!

[Red Economist]

Two nights ago I was privileged to see the Australian premiere of German Concentration Camps Factual Survey (1945/2014). They did get many of their "facts" wrong, for instance labelling camps such as labelling Dachau an "execution camp" with a gas chamber. And I don't pretend to be an expert on the Holocaust. And even as a layman I don't like hearing that "6 million Jews were systematically killed in concentration camps" because that's a matter of opinion. 5-6 million Jews, and 5 million others, died in concentration camps, and their deaths were due to a combination of starvation, illness, and deliberate killings, all of which are direct results of treatment by the Nazi regime. In the 1930's before WWII Jews and other minorities were targeted and persecuted. There were laws passed restricting what Jews could do, where they could work, and whether they could go to school. Note of course though that women were also restricted in much the same way, however they were not targeted by the Nazi regime to be put into concentration camps and taken out of society entirely as the Jews were.


By most modern estimates from active WWII historians, between 5 to 6 million Jews perished in concentration camps. There was not, at least to my knowledge, any concentration camp that was designed as an "execution camp". Rather, some of them (6 in total) were covertly converted into them. One of the reasons why they didn't need more execution camps is because they moved targeted prisoners from other camps to be executed. It wasn't until January 1942 that the Final Solution policy was formulated. And, I have absolutely no idea on what date the first systematic executions began taking place, but nevertheless they did take place and in 1942 around 2.7 million Jews died in concentration camps. It doesn't take a mathematician to tell you that the intensity of Jewish deaths in 1942 can only be explained if most of those deaths were intentional executions. Besides the systematic executions, the living conditions that they put the Jews and other minorities through in  the ghettoes and concentration camps facilitated the epidemic-like spread of disease, and the limited food they provided resulted in starvation. To many people that amounts to murder as well.

Deniers claim that there is insufficient evidence for the gas chambers, for the systematic executions specifically. That simply isn't true. Forensic testing of suspected gas chambers returned positive results for hydrogen cyanide, there are blueprints for the chambers, and there's other evidence of their existence and intention. Since it was a secretive operation of course there will be conflicting evidence, that's the nature of a secret directive. They also claim that the 6/11 million number is an invention without any evidence to support it. Well, besides the fact that the Nazis tried to hide many of the mass-burial sites, they were malicious record keepers. So the number of graves, the size of the graves, and the number of people per day per camp put into them are all things that were recorded. Those records are then extrapolated with other information, such as witness testimony, to estimate the total number of prisoner deaths. It is inexact, and 1 million Jews as an error-margin seems like quite a lot (20 percent!), historians however are confident that in the future with further examination of the evidence that the number of deaths will be even better understood and able to be brought to a more precise amount. And most of them do not think the number of Jewish deaths will be outside of the current estimates.

Your argument hinges on denying the "intent" of the Nazis to exterminate the Jews rather than on saying that Jews didn't die; the clip below is from the 2001 Film "Conspiracy" which deals with the Wannsee Conference in which the Final Solution was agreed. I think the Clips are self-explanatory in showing there was 'intent'. If you can find a copy of the full film, it is brilliantly done and worth the time, even if it is difficult viewing. The moral significance of the final solution is not diminished by how many or few people died; it was still genocide.

[abaris]

By most modern estimates from active WWII historians, between 5 to 6 million Jews perished in concentration camps. There was not, at least to my knowledge, any concentration camp that was designed as an "execution camp".

Stop right there and get you facts straight. There have been numerous. Maidanek, Sobibor and Treblinka have been built with the sole purpose of systematically killing as many people as possible. And there's absolutely no dissent among historians that the intent was to eliminate at least all European jews. You get it from the horse's mouth, so to speak. The memoires of Rudolf Höss, commander of Auschwitz and later supervisor of the concentration camps system speak volumes, as do the witness testimonies of Franz Stangl, commander of Sobibor and Treblinka. And then of course there is the protocol of the Wannsee conference, held in january 1942, where the intent was made clear by Rainhaird Heidrich. There's the speech of Heinrich Himmler at a conference in Posen in october of 1942, talking to senior SS-officials about eliminating the jews (it has even been recorded) and there's the lesser known testimony of the SS-lawyer Konrad Morgen before the Auschwitz tribunal, held between 1963 and 1965 in the German city of Frankfurt.

And that's only scratching the surface.

[Brian37]

Agruing over numbers of deaths is moot to me. It does not change that Hitler DID scapegoat Jews. But he also caused the death of 50 million humans civilian and soldier worldwide because of his chase after a utopia trying to bring Germany to a new glory day.

But accepting that innocent Jews were murdered does not mean what Jews in Israel taking land that did not belong to them is any different than what Europeans did to Native Americans. The lesson of the Holocaust is not pro Jew, it is a lesson like Native Americans and black slavery. It is all a lesson on what not to do to our fellow humans.

But I am sick of the big three dodging the elephant in the room pretending it is race or culture or national, IT IS FUCKING RELIGION. You can only argue that some don't view it that way, but enough DO in all three think a holy book makes them special and gives them special land rights because their god told them so. It doesn't take all of them to view it that way, but just enough to hold the rest of their respective populations hostage.

You don't find peace or solve problems by ignoring the root cause. None of the three should expect to wipe out the other. But it still does not change that there are just enough in all three that think a god gave them special rights to set up social pecking orders. You will not manage differences better until that is accepted as the root cause.

[Aractus]

Stop right there and get you facts straight. There have been numerous. Maidanek, Sobibor and Treblinka have been built with the sole purpose of systematically killing as many people as possible.

From Wikipedia: "Although initially purposed for forced labor rather than extermination, the camp was used to kill people on an industrial scale during Operation Reinhard, the German plan to murder all Jews within their General Government territory of Poland."

Treblinka and Sobibor I believe you about and I stand corrected.

[downbeatplumb]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RC1c5WcztqE

[Aractus]

Loved this vid from a historian:

http://youtu.be/VoXX9XqdVd8