Holocaust denial

[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.