Holocaust Denial

[Brian37]

I am somewhat disheartened by the apparent rise of Holocaust denial on the internet and elsewhere.

It seems holocaust denial and anti-semitism are one and the same.

Do you know any ways or info I can throw at those deniers to get them to STFU?!

I would think the biggest argument would be the near dissapearence of Judaism in Europe (i.e, all the traditional strong centers of Jewish culture in Germany and Eastern Europe are pretty much all gone!)

Any ideas?

Not sure why you posted this, you think we are a bunch of deniers because we are atheists? I've been on this website since 2012 and I don't remember one Holocaust denier. I have seen trolls on the internet and yes conspiracy nuts, sure, but most of the western world accepts it happened. 

Makes this atheist, me, sick too. But we also have ISIS and KKK and Neo Nazis living on our planet too.

JFK conspiracies and 9/11 conspiracy nuts and climate change deniers exist too. Yes there are lots of nuts out there.

[Edwardo Piet]

Do you know any ways or info I can throw at those deniers to get them to STFU?!

If you could get an extremist to shut up, they wouldn't be an extremist.

[Anomalocaris]

I have heard that The Holocaust wasn't widely known in American and British circles in the immediate decade or so after the war. I think it wasn't until the early 1970s that the murder of 6 million Jews got the name of Holocaust.

Could that be because of it took place in Poland and the USSR far away from any any American or British reporters? I hear the Soviets were pretty tight-lipped and restrictive about providing access, and they and the eastern bloc engaged in a form of holocaust denial where the anti-semitic nature of Nazi Germany's crimes was vastly downplayed.

I am considering going on a trip to Germany, Poland and Prague to see the former sights of it myself. It is such a fascinating yet horrific period of human history.

In my opinion the Holocaust is the worst thing to have happened on the planet, worse in some ways than any of Stalin or Mao's crimes.

USSR didn't deny the holocaust.  They don't ever deny the crimes of fascism, which owes its existence to anti-communism, after all.   It may seem scarcely possible or necessary,  but they actually exaggerate the crimes of the Nazis in terms body count and luridness in their historiography.  What they did deny was the significance of such a large fraction of the victims being Jews.  They would say so many citizens or so and so country parishes at Auschwitz, not so many Jews.  In communist doctrine, religious and ethnic identity are shameful feudal attributes of corrupt societies communism will supplant.  Not recognizing the victim as Jews is in their opinion a way to do victims honor, it's like saying those victims can't be so base as to see themselves through ethnic or religious identities, why no doubt in their final moments they were almost ready to fight fascists like good communists.

[Cyberman]

There's always the fact that, to my knowledge, none of the senior Nazi figures ever denied their part in the Holocaust. Which, you know, would presumably be your first objection if it didn't happen.

[Anomalocaris]

There's always the fact that, to my knowledge, none of the senior Nazi figures ever denied their part in the Holocaust. Which, you know, would presumably be your first objection if it didn't happen.

Hmmm, I thought most of the ones brought to trial did, to try to save their own necks.

[Crossless2.0]

There's always the fact that, to my knowledge, none of the senior Nazi figures ever denied their part in the Holocaust. Which, you know, would presumably be your first objection if it didn't happen.

That, or breathtakingly bad appointed counsel.

Wait, I could have just denied the whole thing? What the fuck, Carl?!?

[Rev. Rye]

There's always the fact that, to my knowledge, none of the senior Nazi figures ever denied their part in the Holocaust. Which, you know, would presumably be your first objection if it didn't happen.

Hmmm, I thought most of the ones brought to trial did, to try to save their own necks.

I think Goring tried to deny it, but most of the rest just said that "an order's an order" and that they weren't liable and they were somehow kept in the dark about the Concentration Camps anyway, even though, at best (or least damningly) some of them knew just what questions to avoid asking to what people, especially when, IIRC, most of the Nuremberg defendants (with the obvious exception of Rudolf Hess, British POW since before the Wannsee Conference) witnessed Himmler's Posen speech where he spoke with uncharacteristic frankness about the the extermination of the Jews.

Also, I highly doubt the USSR ever denied the Holocaust, especially given that the Red Army were the ones who liberated Auschwitz in the first place. Honestly, if anything, they might have actually exaggerated it a little, since, until the fall of the Iron Curtain, the Auschwitz museum claimed that four million died there (the number would later be revised to 1.5 million, a number closer to the accepted estimated death tolls than the ones the Soviets gave.)

http://www.nytimes.com/1992/06/17/world/...blets.html

[CatholicDefender]

I never said the eastern bloc nations denied the holocaust as such but they sort of twisted the facts of it to twist their own ideologies (i.e not emphasizing the particular anti semitic nature of it.)

At this point I have only a few questions about this whole holocaust business.

1. Were Jews the only ones targeted for the gas chambers? From what I understand there were no massive gas chambers at the concentration camps in Germany proper (Bergen Belsen,Dachau, Mauthausen etc.) Rather they were mainly in Aushwitz and other remote camps in eastern Poland.

Many people were targets of the holocaust (gays, Soviet POWS, Gypsies Jehovah's witnesses) but were Jews the only ones largely sent to gas chambers?

2. Why are there so many holocaust survivors? The people in those camps suffered horrendous conditions and were subjected to a genocidal regime. How did s many manage to live to tell the tale, and why did the Nazis permit any of them live to tell their tale to the liberators?

3. How did Soviet soldiers treat camp inmates? As we know the Soviet army largely behaved like the hordes of Genghis Khan when they were in Germany. Killing, pillaging and raping the whole live long day. Were they decent and humane to the inmates of Auswitz,Majdanek etc? I remember in Schindlers List the Soviet soldier on horseback told the inmates they were free and that was about it. Did they care for them or help them? For some reason I am having difficulty finding much info on it.

4. When did The Holocaust begin to be recognized in America? For some reason I don't think Holocaust remembrance day was celebrated in the immediate years after the war. It seems only in the past 40 years or so that many books, television programs and movies have been made about it.

In all the "post war" years I can think of perhaps three which touch on it: The Diary of Anne Frank (1959), Judgement at Nuremberg (1961) and the Sound of Music (1964.) (The last one dealt with potential Catholic victims of the Holocaust..a singing nun who cared for a gloomy and stern father of 8 (he must have had a nun fetish...the naughty man!) After being targeted only for being Catholic, the Von Trapp family had to flee to a convent and then to Switzerland to avoid the ever encompassing net of the SS.

I get the sense that in the aftermath of World War 2, people knew Hitler and the Nazis were evil, but had sort of a garbled understanding of why. Internet and television did not really exist then, so it would be difficult to really know about aushwitgz, gas chambers and 6 million dead. I think people knew about the camps, the medical experiments, shady rumors about lampshades and soap made from dead human beings, but did not have a whole ton of info on it otherwise.

I suppose with America's growing acceptance of multiculturalism, specific persecutions of people based on race or religion have just become much more important which explains a greater interest and platform in the Holocaust generally.

I may have said it before but I think its the defining "Bad" point in all human history. It is so because it utterly negated the idea that human societies become more humane the more knowledge and technology they accrue.

It is also sort of an eery indictment of western society including England and the USA, both back then and now. Hitler and the Nazis were shockingly unoriginal.

All they did was persecute the people that mainstream society already largely despised or did not care about. I honestly believe it could happen all over again in the USA or any western nation providing conditions were right, sad to say.

[Rev. Rye]

1. Not really, they were just the most prominent ones, due in no small part to Hitler going on about them nonstop for over a quarter of a century. There were no doubt people of other stripes who ended up in the gas chambers.

2. Because there was a finite limit to the amount of bodies the cremation furnaces could handle, and the whole Massenmord enterprise only lasted for a few years, and quite a few people managed to survive to the liberation.

3. Well, here's one article about what happened with the Soviets after libeating Auschwitz. I also remember an incident where Red Army soldiers tried to feed emaciated survivors some of their food, but they died because it was too rich. Yes, Soviet Army Food was too rich.
 
4. Well, in the US, remembrance days were only officially authorised in 1979, but in the EU, remembrance days stretch back to 1950. It's clear that the US recognised that something horrible had happened as soon as the news came out, especially given that they were instrumental in prosecuting the perpetrators.

It's like I said earlier, in the decade immediately after the liberation, it appears American society decided it was just a gruesome chapter they didn't want to deal with. But, after survivors like Elie Wiesel started telling their story, and Neo-Nazi jackasses like George Lincoln Rockwell said "Lies! All Lies!" We figured out that this was a bad track to take.

Also, there were indeed other Holocaust films made before the 1970s, even a couple predating The Diary of Anne Frank (including, and if I'm lying, I'm dying, a MUSICAL about a Holocaust survivor), but this one was shot mere months after the war ended:






Also, check the dialogue at 92:36

- I followed orders.
- You GAVE the orders

And I see no reason it can't happen again, and I see no reason it wouldn't if Trump and the Republican Party take their attitude towards Mexicans and Muslims to its logical conclusion.

[Fake Messiah]

When it comes to Holocaust deniers ask them what they would do to Jews if they came to power and you'll have them prove that Holocaust happened.