Holocaust Denial

[Gawdzilla Sama]

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?

Holocaust denial is a conspiracy theorists wet dream.

[Anomalocaris]

[quote pid='1611093' dateline='1504037037']

I guess they did, but for some reason Ive always had sort of an aversion to reading about them and their exploits.

I vastly prefer reading about the battle of London, Operation Torch and D-day as opposed to anything the Russians did. It just seems like such a bloody, bad and cold place to be at that time, so I prefer not to read about it. I also pity the German soldiers who froze to death and were starved at Stalingrad. Not all of them were Nazis you know!

Btw, I really really hate reading about the Italian campaign. It just was a long hard slog to nowhere it seemed. Ever wonder why hollywood makes so few movies about the Italian theater? There was no Italian campaign version of saving Private Ryan(thoughh the Pacific version, the Thin Red Line is fantastic!!). Perhaps because it was primarily a British/Austrlian venture with only minority Yankee support?

Anyway, the Soviet contribution just doesn't interest me much, so I tend not to read about it.

Let's just say if it were not for the Soviet contribution Europe would be speaking German now.

Throughout 1941-1945 >65% of all German armies were committed to the eastern front, even after D day.   70% of all German military casualties were inflicted by the soviets.    The size of the forces involved in the Italian campaign (10-15 divisions) would have been insignificant by the standard of eastern front.  Such a force would have been chewed up and spat out in a few days during the peak campaigning season on the eastern front.   The entire Italian campaign would not have warranted a foot note if it had been part of the war in the eastern front.   The destruction of the German army in the east by the Soviets summer offensive in 1944 doomed Nazi Germany.   Compared to the eastern front, the land war in the west is but a side show.   Even in late 1944, Hitler believed his hope to stave off defeat lies in shattering the more easily defeated Americans and British in the Ardennes, because there is no hope of making a meaningful dent on the soviets.

True enough. But who led the bombing campaign abasing German cities destroying much of the industrial capacity? I believe that was the Yanks and Brits!

Let's not get ahead of ourselves here. The main thing that destroyed Germany's industrial capacity for waging war was the staggering inefficiency and blunders of German war planning and war management.

The British and American air champaign destroyed a sizable portion of latent German war industrial capacity, yes. But a far larger portion of German latent industrial capacity laid idle through early 1944 because of German mismanagement. As a result, the Germans were able to quickly replace most industrial capacity destroyed in the air raid by activating previously unused capacity. The Germans didn't run out of idle capacity to activate until late 1944, when they've already lost the war. This is why German war production continued to increase through out the war until 1944 despite air raids. It is highly doubtful allied bombing material reduced German war production by much until late 1944.

Our air campaign mainly punched their fat, not their muscle, until they've already lost the war.

The main contribution of allied air campaign over Germany was to force Germany to redeploy the Luftwaffe from the front to over the Reich. This cost them air superiority over the eastern front during the critical period in 1944, when Germany's main army concentration on the eastern front was shattered by soviet summer offensive.

[CatholicDefender]

How could that be? What were the British bombers doing for years if not degrading German industrial capacity?

Was it all squirreled away in the Bavarian mountains?

Also, what was the purpose of the German concentration camps (the ones sans gas chambers..Dachau, Bergen-Belsen, Buchenwald etc?)

From what I understand, the non Polish camps were just terrible work camps, where the ideas was to pretty much work the inmates to death or have them die naturally from disease and starvation.

One canard of the Holocaust deniers is that the reason so many inmates died was because of allied saturation bombings which destroyed the German ability to feed the prisoners. Is that true, or were they deliberately starved?

I understand the liberation of Bergen-Belsen was an especially horrifying event. While it was good the prisoners were released, many of them died immediately after liberation, and the British army found itself traumatized and swamped by the aftermath of the liberation.

Did they burn it to the ground out of hatred for it, or just because it was a massive typhus house?

One thing I notice, is that the world is running out of holocaust survivors. There just aren't that many people left who were adults when they went to the camps. These days holocaust survivors is a label to any Jewish person who lived in Europe during the 1930s-40s.

Nowadays it seems all the holocaust survivors were at Aushwitz and no other camp, all of them were experimented on by Dr. Mengele (he can't be everywhere at once!).

There aren't really masterful works on the camps anymore. In the old days it was Elie Wiesel, Primo Levi and (Rest their souls) Anne and Otto Frank.

In the past 20 years there have been massive numbers of memoirs written about the camps, some of which turned out to be false.

1.http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/US/story?id=6903068

2.https://carolynyeager.net/holocaust-scholar-finds-“diamond-girl”-be-work-fiction

3.https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jun/24/holocaust-survivor-lied-joseph-hirt-auschwitz

[The Grand Nudger]

How could that be? What were the British bombers doing for years if not degrading German industrial capacity?

Largely ineffective high altitude bombing, followed by even more ineffective nighttime bombing, is what.  

Was it all squirreled away in the Bavarian mountains?

No need.  Speaking of Bavaria, though....during the Black Thursday raid over Schweinfurt (the second time we tried it) we lost 60 b17s and 600ish men, damaged many hundreds more (both planes and men).....cratered an entire town, but failed to knock out a ball bearing factory - the target of the raid.  It spent 6 weeks repairing minor damage and chewed through some of the surplus it had set aside for the occasion..and meanwhile, we lost air superiority over Germany in the attempt..for our trouble.  

Factory still stands, today, btw, lelz.

[drfuzzy]

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.

Just go visit the Holocaust Museum in DC.  https://www.ushmm.org/

[Anomalocaris]

How could that be? What were the British bombers doing for years if not degrading German industrial capacity?

Was it all squirreled away in the Bavarian mountains?

The British were destroying German industrial capacity.  But so much more of German industrial capacity was idle compare to the amount the British was destroying, the Germans easily replaced any amount of the British destroyed, so the total capacity dedicated to war production didn't go down because of the bombing.   In fact, the Germans were able to progressively bring far more idle capacity online for war production than the capacity the British and Americans were destroying by bombing from 1942-1944, that German war production not only didn't suffer, it went up dramatically over the same period.

In fact, the limiting factor of German war production prior to end of 1944 was not damage to its industrial capacity by British and American bombing.  It was shortage of manpower.  The manpower demands of the german army on the Russians front was by far the more important factor in creating the manpower shortage in German war industry compared to anything the British and Americans were doing.   It was this shortage that forced the Germans to employ concentration camp slave labor on a epic scale to facilitate ramping up of their idle industrial capacity from 1942-1944.

The bottom line is the battles in the east did far more to destroy Nazi germany than the battles in the west.   This is not to say the contribution of the Americans and British were insignificant.  But it does say the most important military battles for understanding the overall course of the war were not the ones the British and Americans fought.  It could be argued the single most important contribution the western allies made to defeating Germany were not the bombs dropped or the battles fought, it was the enormous amount of lend lease war material that the United States provided to the Soviet Union.   For many critical war materials, like cross country trucks that enabled a mechanized army to move, or locomotives to enable the war industry to function, the United States provided those to the Soviet Union in volumes that were several times greater than the total production of those materials by Germany during the entire war.

It is not unfair to say the western allies used Russians as cannon fodder to defeat the Germans, we supplied much of the materials, while the Russians supplied most of the blood.

[CatholicDefender]

Was Erwin Rommel a "good guy "at any level at all?

I know there is this story of him being some sort of honorable chivalrous soldier, and the British had some sort of weird crush on him at the time.

Apparently there were many Jewish communities in Tunisia and other areas of North Africa yet they were never killed or gassed at all. If Rommel helped prevent that I suppose he was sort of a good egg.

He was compelled to commit suicide by Hitler but I do not know why

[downbeatplumb]

Was Erwin Rommel a "good guy "at any level at all?

I know there is this story of him being some sort of honorable chivalrous soldier, and the British had some sort of weird crush on him at the time.

Apparently there were many Jewish communities in Tunisia and other areas of North Africa yet they were never killed or gassed at all. If Rommel helped prevent that I suppose he was sort of a good egg.

He was compelled to commit suicide by Hitler but I do not know why

Many Germans weren't bad people. But they supported a regime that was fundamentally evil and killed in its name. Happens all the world over give a man a uniform and a medal and you can make the most ordinary person do horrible things.

[Anomalocaris]

He certainly was very decent in his treatment of both POW and local Jews within the area controlled by his army. He forbad his son from joining the SS because of SS brutality. I would say he was a very decent man, but he does seem to suffer from certain intellectual dissonance regarding the conduct of Germany overall.

[LastPoet]

He certainly was very decent in his treatment of both POW and local Jews within the area controlled by his army.  He forbad his son from joining the SS because of SS brutality.  I would say he was a very decent man, but he does seem to suffer from certain intellectual dissonance regarding the conduct of Germany overall.

Many of the prussian descent generals were uneasy with Hitler's methods. But given that they were military families, the dissonance was obfuscated by their patriotism. Same happens in the US of Trump now.

I would like to know a reason for the fuctardedness of patriots these days. Its one thing to love your homeland, traditions, etc. Another thing is to vaunt yourself and your place on the planet as 'special'.

The US is not special, it was in the begginning, up until they sat on a fantasy throne as rulers of the "free world".

There is no place for rulers in a free world. Just education and the fostering of ideas.