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If 'WWII revisionism' means the idea that the Nazis weren't all that bad, or even Holocaust denial, then no. No, it is not.
I think it would help to avoid woolly euphemisms like 'WWII revisionism' and clearly state the thesis that is being considered. I do not think the public consensus that Nazi Germany was bad, that it committed hideous atrocities, and that it was right to destroy it is likely to change.
Holocaust Denial is receiving the most engagement at this moment than it ever has since it was formulated in the 1970s. By far. Yes it is going mainstream too.
Some of the keystone claims of the Holocaust narrative are plainly absurd and will be Revised as well. Many already have been Revised. It was claimed 4 million were killed in Auschwitz until the 1990s, when the death toll dropped to 1.1 million. It was claimed 2 million were killed in Majdanek at the Nuremberg Trial and the most recent estimates by the Majdanek Museum estimate the death toll from all prisoners from all causes was about 70,000. It was claimed 5 million Gentiles were killed in the Holocaust, but that has been Revised and acknowledged to have been a deceptive lie. The Holocaust has already been revised a lot and it has a long way to go.
One of the most infamous claims, that the Nazis manufactured bars of soap out of the fat of Jewish Holocaust victims, was Revised not too long ago and admitted to not have been true. The other salacious claim involving shower rooms stands today but it won't for that much longer. Holocaust Revisionism has entailed a steady stream of victories but it hasn't penetrated the public consciousness although it is clearly beginning to do so now.
I think when you're as fringe as Holocaust denial, even tiny increases in salience will be perceived, from the inside as significant. A jump from 0.01% to 0.02% is tiny, but still a doubling of interest.
Are we anywhere near the point where someone who isn't a conspiracy theorist or historical obsessive asks questions about the Holocaust? No. You mention a claim about the Nazis making soap out of victims - I've never heard of the idea that Nazis made soap from the bodies of murdered Jews, and I am, by normie standards, a WWII history nerd. (Simple test: I know what the Wannsee conference was. Most people do not.) I do not think that anyone near to what we might reasonably call the mainstream has heard of or cares about whether or not the bodies of Jews were turned into soap. As such, even if that's something widely believed and if there's been a change of mainstream academic opinion on it, I don't think it tells us anything about whether or not Holocaust denial is going mainstream.
Wait, really? They took us to one of the Holocaust museums as kids and the soap and lampshade stuff was front and center, right next to the pile o'shoes display and gold fillings. It's 100% in "top ten things everyone knows about the Holocaust."
Looking at the wiki article, five years after our trip there were still published arguments going "we've gotta stop claiming this because it gives the denierists ammunition!", suggesting that team soap was still firmly in control in the early 00s.
The more this stuff happens, the more I Nootice Signal's point about the revisionists forcing revisions that are never, ever acknowledged to have happened. The narrative just smoothly changes from one second to the next.
Yeah I'm not particularly Holocaust passionate and definitely was aware of the lampshade thing.
I was not aware that it was anything more than an urban myth.
When the Buchenwald concentration camp was liberated by the United States, the first unit on the scene was the Psychological Warfare Division (PWD/SCHAEF), which according to Wikipedia was tasked with "psychological warfare against German troops and recently liberated countries in Northwest Europe, during and after D-Day."
The PWD headed the "investigation" of Buchenwald, and that special unit was mostly Jewish. The most infamous propaganda from the PWD "investigation" of Buchenwald was a video of a forced march of the civilians of Weimar through the Buchenwald concentration camp, where they were shown a table that they were told contained a lampshade made of human skin at the request of the wife of the SS commandant, Ilse Koch, as well as two shrunken heads.
The artifacts on the table became a huge story reported by American media, although the human skin lampshade and shrunken heads end up "lost" before they are tested for authenticity. At the trial of Ilse Koch, during which she was in late-stage pregnancy after being raped in American detention, there was a different lampshade presented which was tested and shown not to be made of human skin. Ultimately those charges were dropped by prosecutors but she was sentenced to life in prison.
Thomas Dodd, American prosecutor at the Nuremberg Trial, took a series of photographs posing with one of the "shrunken heads" allegedly made by the Nazis at Buchenwald and displayed on the table during the forced tour of Weimar. Dodd created a sensation by presenting the shrunken head at the opening of the trial. But ultimately that artifact like the others were "lost" before they were tested for authenticity and have never been found. Of course Revisionists claim the Buchenwald human skin lampshade and shrunken heads were atrocity propaganda planted by PWD. Mainstream historians have mostly dropped the claim of human-skin lampshades and shrunken heads at Buchenwald but at the time they were major news stories in American media.
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