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Holocaust deniers tend to all focus on Auschwitz, and with good reason: it was a massive operation with three prominent subcamps, it had the most victims and most survivors, it received mostly western and Balkan Jews as well as POWs and political prisoners. In short, it had a wide range of experiences; which is ideal for someone who wants to chip away at a subject that an individual has a very general and non-specific understanding of.
A classic tactic of deniers (and conspiracy theorists in general) is to insert a wedge into the mind of a layman, and then try to lever it. They have a vast array of knowledge of all kinds of minutiae about the subject, and the layman does not. They have an endless arsenal of anecdotes or factoids or even legitimately true things that they known and the layman does not. A classic example would go like this: did you know Auschwitz had a swimming pool? It's true! The Germans even let prisoners use it! Boy, that doesn't sound like the sort of thing a death camp would have, now would it? Huh, I wonder why we never learned about that in history class... wonder what else we're not told about.
And then maybe the layman goes and googles it and boy, sure enough it's true. Of course some of the details are fudged: yes, there was a reservoir for firefighting that the German guards would swim in sometimes, and even let certain privileged political prisoners use from time to time. It was a massive operation, with thousands of guards and support staff that along with lodgings and mess halls needed some form of entertainment. And in the bigger picture it doesn't really change anything: somewhere close to a million people were murdered at Auschwitz, swimming pool or no. Someone posted the link to epistemic learned helplessness: this is the exact kind of thing that heuristic is meant to guard against.
So when @SecureSignals says something like "There are no written orders for extermination of millions", he's hoping you might go google it and think "well jeez, it turns out we don't have a Führerbefehl relating to the Holocaust. Why did I never know that?", and from that be incrementally swayed to his side. Of course, if you were to actually read a history of the Holocaust you would know; but most people don't read history books about any subject, and let pop culture shape their impressions for them.
Holocaust deniers have in previous decades focused on Auschwitz because the historical narrative, and particularly the cultural depiction of the Holocaust in popular culture, was focused on Auschwitz. After all, until the fall of the Soviet Union in the 1990s it was claimed that four million people were murdered at Auschwitz, only to be revised downwards to the still-wildly inflated 1.5 million. Auschwitz is also the only "extermination camp" which claimed to have an intact gas chamber, the "gas chamber" which you will see frequently posted to the front-page of Reddit and has been visited by millions of unwitting tourists.
It was the Revisionists who visited the archives and procured the blueprints which label this room a morgue (Leichenkeller) during the period it was allegedly a gas chamber. It was Revisionists who exposed in an undercover interview the head of the Auschwitz Museum admitting that the "Zyklon introductory chimneys" in that room were in fact "reconstructions" built post-war in Soviet-occupied Poland, whereas previously all were told that they were original structures attesting to the homicidal function of the room.
If you talk to a smart anti-denier, he will downplay the importance of Auschwitz and in particular the importance of that famous gas chamber on the Auschwitz tour (the only one left standing at any of the extermination camps!). But that's only because Revisionists have forced a retreat.
Well then help bring back the people who would potentially be swayed upon learning that there are no such documents ordering the extermination of the Jews. You say "if you would read a history book, you would know", but can you just explain it to everyone real quick and save them the trouble? Why are there no documents, @johnfabian?
Gee, I guess these American photographers who took pictures like this were all lying and faking too, then, SecureSignals?
Or this one:
Who are the actors playing Patton, Bradley and Eisenhower in this one?
Plainly the Eisenhower presidential library is just unreliable source!
The high mortality at these camps liberated by the Western allies was caused by a collapsing German infrastructure as it was being destroyed in the final days of the war. It is no longer claimed that Buchenwald or its sub-camp Ohrdruf were extermination camps with gas chambers. The high death toll is what initially caused the gas chamber story to center on Western camps. Images can also be deceiving in several ways. For example, one of your images is captioned:
But it's far more likely that this was a makeshift cremation of people who had died from other causes, like epidemic typhus. There are no credible accusations that I am aware of describing the Germans burning prisoners alive, and it is not maintained by official historiography that this took place (although Elie Wiesel claimed to witness this at Auschwitz in his memoir). On the other hand, the cremation of prisoners that had died was standard operating procedure in order to reduce the spread of disease and epidemic typhus.
Another example of a notoriously deceptive image is found in your link to the Eisenhower presidential library. There is an infamous image of the dead prisoners at the Nordhausen camp, captioned "April 12, 1945 - A portion of the bodies found by U.S. troops when they arrived at Nordhausen concentration camp in Germany." But it is well-known that this camp was bombed by the RAF. You can even see the mass destruction in all the buildings surrounding the bodies which have been used as a prop for propaganda. CODOH has an article on the Nordhausen film and image propaganda:
To summarize, the mass death and destruction at Nordhausen concentration camp was caused by RAF bombings of the camp and civilian areas. The United States arrived and produced propaganda films of the aftermath which was submitted as evidence of German brutality at the Nuremberg trial, with no mention that these were victims of Allied bombing. Likewise, the caption of that photograph in the Eisenhower library "A portion of the bodies found by U.S. troops when they arrived at Nordhausen concentration camp in Germany" makes no mention that these people were killed by Allied bombings. In fact, the Nordhausen camp population was minority Jewish. So this is a picture of mostly non-Jewish victims of RAF bombings being posed and passed off as Holocaust victims of a German extermination policy.
The image is real, the context and its use in Holocaust propaganda is highly deceptive.
Speaking of deception, Eisenhower was in command of the Psychological War Division (PWD/SCHAEF) which was the unit which conducted the "investigation" of Buchenwald after its liberation. There's the infamous propaganda film of the forced march of the civilians of Weimar through Buchenwald, which culminates in a table display of human-skin lampshades and shrunken heads allegedly created by the Germans. The shrunken heads were disappeared after they were dramatically presented on the first day of the Nuremberg trial, and the human-skin lampshade was also conveniently disappeared. Historians have also dropped the famous human-skin lampshade story.
Not surprisingly, the famous images of the shrunken heads and human-skin lampshade at Buchenwald did not make it into the album you posted.
What you then claim what happened with Polish Jewish pre-war population? Are you also claiming that forcing Jews into ghettos by Germans was fake? Executing people across conquered territories?
I bet that there is plenty of propaganda (add "soap made from human fat" to that) but presenting in a way that claims "Germans have not mass-murdered millions" is even more misleading.
Also, is it intentional that your username in short is SS?
I think the whole demographic question (ie. what happened to the prewar Jewish population) is the crucial question here, much moreso than the concentration camp doors or camp memoirs etc., but this is also a month old subthread so it's probably not a good place to discuss such issues.
It is mostly intended as feedback to SS - in case they are interested why normies like me react to them as they react.
(especially as typical reaction may be based in the end on it, even if ends phrased as "go away")
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Yes, the revisionists do have answer. Here is the CODOH reply to mainstream historians. You see that they agree that holocaust happened, only Stalin instead of Hitler was the perpetrator.
https://holocausthandbooks.com/index.php?page_id=29
Anatoly Karlin predicted that this line will become official Western history line in 21st century as Second Cold War heats up. We will see.
edit: links added
I have, actually, read the Sanning book, and found it, to put it mildly, underwhelming. It's essentially a series of it-just-so-happenses - it just so happens that the Polish demographical data on local Jewish population was vastly overcounted without either the Poles or the occupying Germans catching on to this, it just so happens that once this is established the same overcount can be expected to apply on other Eastern European nations as well, it just so happens that out of that population a larger-than-assumed share left for Soviet Union and the Soviets then deported/killed them (even though Soviet sources don't show such deportations and deaths - sure, such sources became available after the Sanning book was written, but that's no excuse for us to ignore them), it just so happens that there was a vast Jewish wave of emigration in the 30s to other countries not shown in official data etc.
And once you add all the it-just-so-happenses together, presto - the numbers advocated by the revisionists! Data massaging would be putting it lightly - and in many cases the data is essentially based on just the sort of testimonials, memoirs and what amounts to guesstimates by individual figures that revisionists don't generally consider to be valid (ie. the idea of Soviet deportations is justified by referring to several testimonies made in front of US House Select Committee on Communist Aggression) in establishing a Jewish genocide by Germans.
Beyond that, though, has there even been an attempt from the revisionist camp to make a similar demographic analysis post-Sanning, taking all the new data (methods of estimating populations in cases where demographic data is considered undertain, post-Soviet archives etc.) into account? If not, it speaks volumes that on this crucial field all that there seems to be is this one book from decades ago, while the general effort of the revisionist sphere seemingly concentrates on individual memoirs and technical camp details, and such.
Also, Karlin's predictive abilitites have not exactly shown their worth in 2022, regarding, well, most aspects of the Russian invasion and its presumed successes.
Karlin was wrong together with the whole world. Everyone from Putin to Biden, from CIA to OSINT twitter expected replay of 2014 Mosul or 2021 Kabul.
Russian maskirovka worked perfectly, everyone saw the manly recruitment videos full of brick smashing and bear wrestling stunts and believed in world's second super power.
Was there anyone notable who predicted that Russians will disastrously fail to defeat Ukraine?
Except our commenter Ilforte/ @DaseindustriesLtd ?
https://old.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/t0cnbx/ukraine_invasion_megathread/hyduv1l/
https://old.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/sxnftk/culture_war_roundup_for_the_week_of_february_21/hy70oxd/
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Oh well, that's all right then; they didn't deliberately murder the people they rounded up and held in camps, it was all down to collapsing infrastructure and typhus.
That is not really any better, SecureSignals, because you still have to explain "why did they round up all these people and hold them in camps?"
No, he actually doesn’t have to explain why they were in concentration camps, because the claim of the holocaust is not that Germans kept Jews in camps like the Americans did the Japanese. The claim of the holocaust is the intentional killing of millions of Jews in these camps.
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The reason intentionality was such a big deal for holocaust historiography is because a lot of other nations have this on their records.
The gas chambers and skin lampshades and SS-she-wolves and Looney Tunes electric roller coasters have to be real, because if was all just starvation and cholera and slave camps and mass reprisal executions the holocaust starts looking too familiar. And it has to be seen as a categorically different and historically unique event, not just a quantitatively worse successor.
(Of course, future generations of historians might not care, and will instead prefer to treat the holocaust as just one of many related examples of "naturally evil white devils being evil")
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Wikipedia is incredibly ambiguous regarding the consensus on the authenticity of the shrunken heads and lampshades.
This seems to leave their authenticity an open question (systematic doesn’t mean it never happened). Google’s top results also seem very evasive and weasely. Do you have anything more solid or unambiguous regarding current mainstream consensus?
General Lucius Clay, the military governor of the US zone of occupied Germany, explained the lampshade story, "Well, it turned out actually that it was goat flesh. But at the trial [of Ilse Koch] it was still human flesh." (Interview with Lucius Clay, 1976, Official Proceeding of the George C. Marshall Research Foundation Quoted in M. Weber, "Buchenwald: Legend and Reality," The Journal of Historical Review, Winter 1986-87 7(4), pp. 406-407.)... A similar statement from General Clay:
Moreover, Ilse Koch had left Buchenwald nearly two years prior to the liberation and PWD table display of these artifacts. If you are interested in a deep-dive into the circumstances surrounding this lampshade and shrunken head display, I would suggest this Revisionist film because the circumstances of these legends are far sketchier than you would probably believe.
The "mainstream consensus", however, is to categorically ignore the issue. They just don't talk about it.
Watched the doc, thanks for the recommendation. There were some mildly cringe parts (wanting to give Ilse Koch a hug lol), but whatever still interesting. Seems fairly clear the skin and heads were planted by the Allies, and this certainly does make me significantly revise my estimate of the likelihood of things. If the allies were provably engaged in conspiracies to fabricate evidence relating to the Holocaust in some cases, it has to make it more likely that other pieces of alleged evidence are merely fabrications as well
Unfortunately it's just the tip of the iceberg. I mentioned in another comment that Majdanek, near Lublin, was the first camp liberated by the Soviets in 1944 months before the liberation of Auschwitz, where identical claims of gas chamber extermination were later made. I would highly suggest This Revisionist film on Majdanek, keeping in mind that Majdanek was the first camp where the story of mass gas chamber extermination in the popular press went viral. There were Soviet investigations, trials, and executions all before Auschwitz was liberated in 1945.
That video was the most influential in gaslighting me to study these issues a lot closer. Revisionists are obviously correct about Majdanek. But mainstream historians maintain a policy of categorically refusing to acknowledge Revisionist arguments. They never do any concessions to Revisionists, they just shore up their own narrative by quietly making modifications to strengthen it against Revisionist critique. For example, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum only last year had this on their website, using the Wayback Machine, April 26 2021:
That page now reads:
With Majdanek excluded. It was Revisionists who did the research decades ago proving that Majdanek was a concentration camp, and not an extermination camp.
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The photos only prove that many starved and many died. Look at photos of Andersonville prisoners from the American Civil War, they look the same. That doesn’t mean necessarily that there were gas chambers or a deliberate extermination program.
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Well there were documents ordering the killing of Jews, and unless you read exclusively denialist writers you would know this. With your wording I'm not sure if you're being deliberately dishonest or if you're just nonspecific in your wording. But I'm going to assume honesty and believe you're referring to the lack of a Führerbefehl: an order from Adolf Hitler, starting the Holocaust.
First of all, you might want to flip the question: would you necessarily expect an order to undertake a vast criminal conspiracy to survive? Ignore the context of everything else for a second: there were 9 million Jews in Europe, give or take, in 1939 (the Nazis believed a higher number because of their racial theories). Planning to kill that many people would qualify as the greatest conspiracy of all time. The key perpetrators might want to conceal their decision-making a bit. Certainly the lack of similar documents haven't stopped the same people who believe in Holocaust denial from alleging in 9/11 or moon landing conspiracies, as an aside.
And the Nazis were quite keenly aware of the importance of secrecy in what they were undertaking. Not only were they not so un-self-aware that they anticipated the rest of the world might quibble with them murdering millions of civilians, the Aktion T4 program had been undermined by insufficient internal secrecy leading to a considerable protest movement against it both within and without Germany. Awareness of the systematic murder of Jews, POWs, and "useless mouths" could (and eventually did) harden resistance and resolve to German conquest, pacification, and occupation of lands in the East. Institutional and operational secrecy was as important and necessary as the undertaking itself. It was, as Himmler later said, a "glorious chapter that has not and will not be spoken of."
Take the Commissar Order, for example. It acknowledged quite openly that it was brazenly in violation of international law, and there was a concerted effort to limit possible leaks: only thirty copies of the original were created, and the ultimate promulgation to the Army Groups was only extended to 340, and ultimately all copies were ordered to be destroyed. If they had been, presumably you'd also argue that "there was no proof of the order to kill Soviet commissars!" which would again be untrue, because even if the primary source documents had not survived we have plenty of contemporary secondary sources, both of those who received the order (including many who subsequently lied about receiving it) and of those who carried it out.
That at some point Hitler ordered the extermination of Jewry is not contested among historians. The specific date is contested; some favour an "early" hypothesis (around September 1941) and some favour a "late" hypothesis (around November-December 1941). The order was almost certainly issued verbally to Heinrich Himmler, hence the lack of "documents", but many of the key figures in the Nazi regime discussed being aware of such an order. In any case, by the time this order had been issued somewhere between 500,000 and a million Jews had already been murdered, but that's a different discussion and deniers tend to very pointedly ignore the Holocaust by bullets anyways.
The big problem deniers have to always work around is that the Nazis themselves never denied the Holocaust. While individuals might have tried to shirk their specific responsibility, when it came to the criminal trials and executions the one legal defence never attempted was "it didn't happen."
Let's not do a Motte and Bailey here, there were documents ordering the killing of a lot of people in WWII. There are of course documents, well-studied by Revisionists, explicating the executions of Jewish partisans and reprisals against the local population. The executions and reprisals are the grain of truth within the wider Holocaust lore, but at the time reprisals were legal under international law and those reprisals were not even considered a warcrime at Nuremberg for that reason. When people talk about the Holocaust and the "final solution", they are obviously referring to the historical assertion that the extermination of the Jews became a matter of policy of the German government as the "final solution" to the Jewish question, and that most of six million Jews were exterminated in makeshift gas chambers disguised as shower rooms. "There were documents ordering the killing of Jews" is a Motte and Bailey at a comical level.
Let's see how the most eminent Holocaust Historian, Raul Hilberg, describes the origin of the "final solution":
You correctly posit the Holocaust as one of the greatest conspiracies in human history- the trans-continental extermination of millions of people in bedroom-sized gas chambers disguised as shower rooms, using Zyklon B pellets or carbon monoxide from the engine of captured Soviet tanks. But Hilberg would have us believe that there was no plan, no blueprint, no budget for this mass conspiracy. It wasn't carried out by a "plan" but by "an incredible meeting of minds, and consensus mind-reading".
On the other hand, a simple matter like an order for the execution of Commissars, was unable to escape exposure in the documentary body of evidence despite being limited to 30 documents that they tried to keep secret and later tried to destroy. Hilberg and you would have us believe that the greatest conspiracy in human history was accomplished without the benefit or survival of written plans, blueprints, or budgets. It was just mind-reading across the German bureaucracy, according to Hilberg.
If the Commissar order couldn't escape being exposed in the documentary body of evidence, it is entirely incomprehensible that the trans-continental extermination of millions of people in bedroom-sized gas chambers was accomplished without the survival of explicitly written plans, blueprints, or budgets, and without bodies or mass graves that have ever been excavated. The Commissar order was directly exposed in the documents, why wouldn't this far more gargantuan conspiracy?
Actually, some historians suggest that it could have not been known by Hitler but that's besides the point. The assertion that this was a homicidal gas chamber disguised as a shower room used to gas Jews is also not contested among historians, but it has been completely refuted by Revisionists nonetheless.
Historians are all over the place in formulating a date on when the extermination was apparently decided upon, but none of them are internally consistent. Historians who pick a date too early are contradicted by documents proving Hitler and Nazi Leadership still considered the Madagascar Plan to be the "Final Solution." Historians who pick a date later than that run into the fact that it is claimed extermination camps were already built and operational, so they are saying the order came after the construction of the earliest extermination centers. But there is no consensus because there is no evidence to establish any of their positions.
Here's an alternative hypothesis: there was no order and never a plan to exterminate the Jews as the "final solution", and that's why the historians have been unable to find documents or even agree on a basic timeline of how this occurred.
Lastly, I'm sure you are aware that upon liberation it was the Western camps which featured most prominently in the propaganda surrounding German "death camps," like Dachau, which were claimed to be the centers of gas chamber extermination. But the Western Allies investigated those claims and found them to be false. The entire death camp narrative shifted to the East, where the Soviets denied access to outside investigators and freely modified structures post-war (like the Auschwitz "gas chamber.")
If the Western camps were originally accused of perpetuating the greatest conspiracy in human history, and those claims turned out to be completely false, why wouldn't that lower your confidence in the authenticity of identical claims in the Eastern camps where all of the evidence and investigation was managed in the Soviet sphere? The "current" map is now oudated as the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum finally revised their website to revise Majdanek from "extermination camp" to "concentration camp", so that's another "death camp" that is in the dustbin of history due to Revisionist research. And that one was in the East and was in fact liberated before Auschwitz.
You can see this article form August 1944, before the liberation of Auschwitz declaring a mass murder of "1,500,000 in Huge Death Factory of Gas Chambers and Crematories" at Majdanek. Then the Soviets liberated Auschwitz in January 1945 and made the exact same claim. The problem is that in 2003 the death toll at Majdanek was revised to something like 50,000. The entire gas chamber narrative began at Majdanek, and just recently historians are finally admitting it was not an extermination camp.
Given your obvious bent and contempt for academic history, again I don't know if you're being deceitful, ignorant, or just plain dumb. The "functionalist" camp is the pre-eminent one in Holocaust studies; scarce few contemporary historians hold that the Holocaust was masterminded by Hitler from the beginning. The Holocaust began roughly simultaneously within three separate Nazi bureaucracies, each with specific problems, methods, and goals. Again, like almost all deniers do, you steadfastly ignore the Holocaust by bullets. By the time the Holocaust moved onto a more deliberate stage and the combined resources of the Nazi state begin to dedicate itself to the task, yes then we have plenty of documentation of that effort (which again you just ignore). Surely you know you're not convincing anyone who has ever opened a history book on the subject?
Well, Himmler would've disagreed with you. And Heydrich and Eichmann, and Goebbels. C'mon dude, these are your heroes! Why are you denying them their greatest works? Think of the shame they would have if 80-odd years on people who claim to follow in their footsteps would disavow the immense effort and sacrifice in attempting rid Europe of Jewry!
This exchange is a lot like this classic meme. You are being extremely condescending and scornful, sneering that anyone that “ever opened a history book” would know better (but refusing to elaborate or engage), while FarNearEverywhere is saying he would break the nose of anyone questioning genocide.
On the other hand, @SecureSignals is providing numerous sources, links and actual arguments regarding the historiography of the Holocaust.
I understand there is the whole issue from Epistemic Learned Helplessness, that a crank with a hobby horse can be much more prepared than a mainstream normie. But you should understand, SecureSignals is coming across better here. In this exchange, the mainstream looks smug and dismissive, but simultaneously evasive and heavily reliant on emotional manipulation.
I've spent enough of my life having exchanges where people say "oh wow, my username means 'race science' in German? I had no idea, I just thought it sounded cool. Anyways, here's why Britain and France were responsible for starting WWII..."
The guy's initials are SS. C'mon.
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In tone, perhaps. @johnfabian is obviously allowing himself to become frustrated.
In substance, though, SecureSignals' debating tactics are similar to those of Ken Ham and Duane Gish.
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It's amazing how far a low effort meme can be elevated by the mastodon-in-bio replies proving that it's gospel truth, my god.
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You know, stuff like this really doesn't help convince people. Obvious consensus enforcement works in most places, but a lot of people here are instinctively suspicious of it to the point that it becomes counterproductive to even try.
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