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It is worth noting in understanding the WWII mythos that is the subject of the discussion. Why was it not mentioned at all in thousands of pages of memoirs across the most important leaders? There are two theories: the mainstream theory is that this is just a testament to how much Allied leaders were ambivalent towards Jews, therefore also providing evidence they wouldn't wage a psychological warfare campaign to sacralize a Jewish victimization narrative which is the ultimate bedrock to this entire discussion- including the reason a song like this is censored so heavily. The Revisionist theory is that they knew the nonsense story about millions being tricked into gas chambers disguised as shower rooms would eventually be debunked like the very similar WWI propaganda about the Kaiser's death factories.
But @johnfabian is wrong that Churchill's writing represents the Holocaust being viewed as uniquely terrible early on, it isn't mentioned at all in many volumes of writing across thousands of pages written by the most important belligerents who otherwise have a strong incentive to feature that story to justify their own frame of the war.
That wasn't hard to find.
So we're talking about one of the biggest events of WWII, and certainly the most unusual event, with millions of men, women and children allegedly being tricked into gas chambers on the pretext of taking a shower and murdered. It's the event that forms the foundation of the contemporary anti-Christ mythos around Hitler.
And you couldn't find a single concrete reference to that in Winston Churchill's six-volume The Second World War, as I said, so you instead point to a single vague reference in a dialogue during a dream-sequence in a short story, which doesn't mention gas chambers or even Jews. Certainly my point still stands very, very tall. The fact you have to reach so hard to find a single reference of this world-changing event (which doesn't directly mention it in any case, it's just a literary allusion) from someone like Churchill proves the point very well.
I don't really believe you in the first place, and I'm not about to scan a book I have no interest in reading.
You made it sound like they never talked about it. But they obviously have in other contexts.
They didn't memory hole this thing. Multiple world leaders basically went from never caring about the Jews and actively keeping Jewish immigrants out of their country to being willing to help them found their own nation state.
Your an unreliable source of facts for me. It's like when I used to talk to 9/11 truthers. Sometimes what they said was correct in a very technical sense, but it would lead to false impressions. The "jet fuel can't melt steal beams" was the memed example. It always took a ton of effort to tease out the truth, way more than their initial assertion.
I've seen other people go through that circus with you. I'm unimpressed. As far as I remember your alternate history basically comes down to something like "gas chambers weren't used and only about 2-3 million Jews died" which seems like not enough to even change anyone's reaction.
The Germans were capable of a 1% death rate in prison camps (the death rate of American POWs). Those are optimal circumstances, since those prisoners are more likely to be healthy young men.
There was an estimated 10 million Jews in Europe. Giving you a nicer target like 500k (5% death rate) which assumes all Jews in Europe were captured and numbers still fall way short of the Germans running normal prison camps where they make an effort to keep people alive.
I also don't really care how mass murderers achieve their numbers. Stalin and Mao got their record breaking numbers through starvation and brutal work conditions, no gas required. They were still evil assholes that committed atrocities. The fact that they aren't condemned as heavily as Hitler is something I blame on leftist academics and media covering for the communist regimes. The Jewish conspiracy angle makes little sense to me since vast number of Jews were also killed by Stalin.
It's pretty dishonest to pretend that nobody would react to the revelation that the entire extermination camp and gas chamber story was a lie, and nobody was killed in that fashion. You are saying you wouldn't care if that turned out to be false (I don't believe you by the way) but it would be shocking to many people. Certainly that story is the epicenter of the placement of Hitler as the anti-Christ of Western Methology. Things get very awkward if you admit the entire gas chamber and extermination camp story was all just a huge lie meant to manipulate the public, a lie you will get arrested in Europe for challenging.
The Typhus epidemic killed 2-3 million people during WWI, mostly civilians. The Germans did not have a vaccine for Typhus during WWII.
The conditions in the concentration camps were also tolerable throughout most of the war, save for outbreaks of disease. It was in the final months of the war when German infrastructure was being destroyed from all sides that the catastrophic conditions became ubiquitous, a fact that this Revisionist film covers very well.
You misread me.
Imagine an alternate world where no one claimed gas chambers and said 2-3 million Jews were rounded up and effectively murdered through horrible conditions and starvation. My assertion is that the end result would have been much the same. It was still a horrible atrocity and large scale genocide carried out with the machinery of the state, and under the guise of a racial ideology. I believe there still would have been a push for a Jewish state, the Nazi ideology would still be viewed as evil antichrist stand in, and this alternate history world would be mostly indistinguishable from our own.
(It should be worth noting that they did not need to be rounded up. So the death rate should be compared to the general civilian population, not the general prison camp population. The choice to round them up in such large numbers was still that: a choice.)
And yeah I will still say I don't really care if they lied about the method of death and doubled the numbers. But I mostly don't care because everyone that would have perpetrated the lie is dead and out of power. Had this lie been 10 years ago, yes I absolutely would care, and I'd want to punish the liars.
I've self assessed this on other issues I care about. I care about communism being an evil ideology that leads to mass murder and starvation. The New York Times is now known to have had active communist agents on the payroll in the 30s-50s. And that these reporters actively helped cover up the atrocities committed by the USSR. But it all doesn't actively bother me very much. And it bothers me far far less than the errors and lies perpetrated over covid. I have a recency bias, and WWII is not recent.
What you don't understand is that those 2-3 million did not die in concentration camps, if that many died at all which is highly doubtful. The death toll in the concentration camps is a small fraction of that number. And most who died in the concentration camps did so in final months of the war due to Germany being destroyed on all sides and infrastructure totally collapsing. Many died under the custody of Stalin during and after the war, and never came under German occupation in the first place. The death toll in the concentration camps was a small fraction of that number.
After the war, 12 to 14 million Germans were expelled and estimates for the number of Germans who died vary but exceed 2 million on the higher end. Nobody knows that fact at all. You are completely wrong that if 2 million Jews had died throughout the war due to general wartime conditions, which would put their attrition similar to the people around them where they lived (Poles, Ukranians, etc.), that the Holocaust mythos would stand as prominently as it does today.
What shocks the conscious is the gas chamber story. That is what makes Jewish suffering more important than the suffering of everyone else in the eyes of the culture.
It says more about you that a radical change of facts on a historical event like this wouldn't register at all with you- you maintain the same opinion even when the historical premise radically changes. You also couldn't possibly be more wrong- the people responsible for perpetuating the lie are very much alive and in power, and they are using their power desperately to keep the lie alive using all means available. Civil and criminal measures enforcing Belief in the ridiculous gas chamber story are far stronger and more widespread than ever before. And banning Holocaust Denial has always been a primary impetus of increased censorship across social media.
I have a recency bias too, and I have eyes and ears and can clearly see the delineation between culture war issues which are fundamental to issues discussed by those like OP and the Holocaust mythos. It's a living mythos, the Hitler anti-Christ narrative is so fundamental to modern culture war issues, saying "WWII is not recent so it doesn't matter much" is incredibly myopic and wrong.
Eh this is why the conversation with you reminds me of other generic conspiracy theorists. It all feels very wishy washy. Like you are doing a cold reading of me, and will push as far as you can in the direction of "nothing bad happened to the jews". Just so we are clear, I still think about 6 million jews died, and that there was a mass extermination effort of some kind. They weren't just killed off as a side effect of being rounded up and put in camps where there was no food and diseases ran rampant.
I just remember seeing that "middle ground" estimate from another conversation someone had with you.
I still think Churchill was uniquely unlikely to mention "gas chambers" because he had a history of controversy around chemical warfare. He was publicly willing to use it against the Germans if they used it first in warfare. And before WWII he was caught in a private conversation advocating that gas attacks be used on 'uncivilized' people. He did publicly talk about the holocaust after the war.
Grok AI does seem to think that there are passages referencing holocaust things:
Growing awareness of a Nazi policy to exterminate Jewish communities and calls it a crime against humanity. That is in volume 4
In volume 5 churchill mentions the unprecedented scale of Nazi massacres. He mentions the liquidation of ghettos, and the use of special camps for mass killings.
Maybe the AI is halucinating. I still believe it more than you. Get me a digital copy of the book that I can ctrl-f and we can settle it for sure.
Here's volume V, you can do a search yourself and there is no reference at all to approximately 3 millions Jews being murdered inside shower rooms.
The mainstream theory is that there are no bodies at the extermination camps like Treblinka because they were all unburied over the course of 120 days and cremated on open-air pyres, despite no documentary or physical evidence for that claim, and despite no contemporary reports of a such an operation.
Why don't you ask Grok if it is possible that 800,000 corpses were exhumed at Treblinka and cremated on open-air pyres over the course of ~120 days? This is what the mainstream claims- this is "The Holocaust." It's completely impossible. Even OpenAI's model now admits this story is not feasible. But this is the Holocaust narrative.
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That fits the ambivalence theory. I don’t see anything in that statement that suggests he sees “the stockyards slaughter house pens” as worse than the ruin of Europe or the destruction of Eastern European capitals.
He was listing the most horrible things that have happened. He considered it equivalent to Europe being a bombed out ruin and 30 million combat deaths. I don't think a plain reading of the passage ever lands on "ambivalence".
I mean, yes. But he also doesn’t really separate out the single event that modern discourse around WW2 the holocaust is the tragedy of the war. Here, it’s surrounded by other atrocities— battle casualties, burned capitols, European cities in ruins. It has not yet developed the mythical power that it will hold much later on. A modern writer talking about the events listed in this passage would never dare to put the holocaust in the same paragraph as other casualties of the war. Modern telling puts the holocaust front and center, alone, with no other atrocities allowed to detract from it. That’s not how Churchill sees WW2. To him, the holocaust is one tragedy among several others, not something uniquely evil or even more evil than the other events of the war.
To post mythic generations, this would be pretty ambivalent, and if the person were Jewish, he’d probably consider such a retelling pretty antisemitic as it downplayed the holocaust compared to how modern history talks about it.
I was a bit of an odd duckling growing up. I watched a lot of history channel, maybe that changed my perspective. I do not feel I learned about the war with that framing. I felt that pearl harbor almost shared equal horror and tragedy with the Holocaust. I mean I guess it was up to the teachers at the time there might be two questions on the Pacific war, and two questions on the Holocaust for the state test so they get equal billing in class lesson plans.
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