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My grandmother used to tell tall tales. She told us that she befriended a cat that followed her to school on the bus, she told us that my aunt was the lovechild of a public figure, she told us that she briefly travelled with circus gypsies as a teenager.
She also told us that she was evacuated to the countryside during the Blitz, that her future husband fought on a submarine, and that her cousin was on a Japanese POW ship which was sunk by a US strike.
Should I therefore conclude that the Battle of Britain and the Allied war against Japan didn't happen?
The difference here is scale. No matter how many Looney Tunes-esque stories Jew-haters can dig up (and you must have noticed how strong the overlap between people who hate Jews and people who deny the Holocaust is), the fact is that the Holocaust was massive. Europe had millions of Jews, and then it had millions less. There are hundreds of thousands of testimonies, not just from the victims who survived or Nazi soldiers, but also Allied soliders who liberated them. There are mass graves, gas chambers, millions of pages of documentation. I don't think it's hyperbole to say that most people in Europe have family or personal stories that interact with the Holocaust in some way. My high school history teacher had German grandparents who were housed in an apartment that had been forcibly vacated by its Jewish inhabitants the very same morning (the coffee was still warm). I have Jewish friends whose family trees are full of lives cut short. I have personally spoken to a woman whose entire extended family was killed except her and her father, and who saw her mother get shot in the head by a Nazi soldier.
This forum is full of contrarians. Contrarianism can be useful. It helps us to question things at are false, but if you don't control the scale, you end up questioning things that are true. You start doubting everything and everyone, and end up believing in massive conspiracies.
A dictator who wanted to establish a Thousand Year Reich deciding to declare war on half the world, thereby dooming his country to defeat in a few short years doesn't make sense. But that is what happened. Death camps may be a waste of resources, but so is invading Russia.
This isn't Ancient Rome. We're not relying on a few parchments from the court propagandists. There are photos, videos, radio recordings, billions of pages of documentation, millions of eyewitnesses, and all of the wonders of modern technology to investigate the recent past. The idea that 'they' (every government, every university, every professional historian, WW2 veterans, both sides of the Cold War, millions of civilian eyewitnesses, right down to chumps like me) is somehow involved in this vast coverup of the truth boggles the mind.
The truth is more prosaic. The Holocaust happened in the way that the historical consensus agreed that it happened. It happened in the same way that every other big event in WW2 happened. It happened because the dictator of Germany, who was always very open about hating Jews, was finally able to enact his will.
I pretty much reject the idea of Holocaust Denial without Antisemitism, because a faked Holocaust is pretty much a concrete open-and-shut case for a world Jewish conspiracy. It requires not only that Jews have had the power to force the story on everyone, to force schools in the United States to make me read five novels about the holocaust in the course of my public education and force half of Europe to throw you in jail if you don't believe in the holocaust; but also that every individual Jew who attests that they lost a family member is a liar. It pretty much positions Jews as a uniquely powerful and evil group. If you don't hate the Jews after confirming that they faked the Holocaust hard enough to sell 30 million copies of Anne Frank's diary, then you're a little looney tunes yourself.
That said, having personal experience as the center of Holocaust proof is rapidly running out of runway:
In 2000, there were close to 6,000,000 WWII veterans alive in the United States; in 2024 there were around 66,000. And worse, in 2000 when I was a kid there were still WWII veterans who were active scoutmasters or deacons or worked actively, I interacted with them as vigorous active guys; in 2024 they are mostly just pushed around senior living centers in wheelchairs. The family stories I pass down to my kids about WWII will be no more meaningful or inherently accurate to them than stories about the Civil War were to me.
Given these facts, it seems unwise to hinge an entire societal worldview on the Holocaust's exact details, or occurrence at all.
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I think part of the problem is that the vast majority of the public education you get about the Holocaust is in the form of unverifiable survivor narratives and nothing else, which leads to the erroneous conclusion that there is no other evidence. No one is going into a middle school history class and hearing the teacher say “ok kids! Here’s 20,000 pages of documents seized from the Nazi archives, let’s plug it into excel and run a statistical analysis!”
I had the opposite happen. Watching the documentary 'One third of the Holocaust', I found I had imagined that there was a much stronger case in favor of the holocaust than what I found.
Same for David Irving's challenge against the gas chambers in Auschwitz. He lost his defamation case on the basis of eye witness testimony, not physical evidence. As, according to Irving and his whole reason for denying the existence of gas chambers in Auschwitz in the first place, there wasn't any.
The biggest realization was that I had not once even spoken to a person that had any idea of what the holocaust actually was outside of fiction. Every normie conversation that veers close to the topic is just people filling in the blanks where evidence is absent. They don't stop believing, Schindler's List is just that good.
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Yeah when I wrote my original post it occurred to me that I was going to have to repeat myself ad infinitum about this, but, I'm not disputing that the holocaust happened or that millions died.
I just think it was likely mostly much more, uh, organic, if you will, than is typically portrayed, and that the numbers given have every hallmark of being substantially inflated. I'm also calling attention to what I see as the fact that all pertinent institutions involved were, at the time, and are still now, under immense pressure to spin things in only one direction, including the nazis. During the war so as to please their superiors; after the war so as to please their captors.
Maybe you're an HBD-denier but if not you must surely see how possible it is for such a 'vast conspiracy' to be not just possible but successful -- outside of extremely niche uncontrolled spaces like this one.
People like to sneer about this but I don't think so. It was Stalin's plan to let the capitalist powers fight it out and then jump on the losing side. Hitler attacked because the USSR was only going to get stronger and was never going to stop being a threat, while if he won he would have the resources to hold off the US. It was a fatal gamble but arguably a necessary one.
There are many, many, many instances of Hitler making terrible strategic decisions; I don't think this is one of them.
Sure; I also notice that it's immaterial to the question, and easy to explain. C.f. HBD-denial again and the overlaps we see there. Actually I'd question your motivation in trying to make the point in the first place; it looks to me like dirty rhetoric.
How top down the holocaust was is actually huge debate in Holocaust studies. Saying your a functionalist ie the Holocaust happened organically through on the ground radicalism and local functionaries working towards the Fuhrer is a totally mainstream opinion in academia.
Can you say why you think the numbers are substantially inflated? We have a pretty good idea of the Jewish numbers throughout Eastern Europe from pre and post war census records and the Jewish community largely just vanishes. You can say those records were doctored but then that gets into the problem of those communities still not existing today.
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A common tactic of people questioning the Holocaust is to say "I'm not questioning the Holocaust but..." followed by things that are carefully worded to cast doubt on the Holocaust without explicitly denying it. And that's what you're doing. You're not disputing it, but you think the numbers are substantially inflated? That's disputing it.
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There was one aspect that was pretty terrible: the decision to invade Russia during winter. Hitler and his generals knew how that was likely to turn out thanks to Napoleon’s experience a century earlier, and IIRC they initially planned to invade in early summer. They were forced to delay the start of their campaign until fall, and instead of postponing the campaign until the following year, they decided to risk a winter invasion after all. It seems to me that that’s probably the stupidest decision he made during the war.
Yes. One imagines meth was involved.
This is also more rational then it looks on it's face the Soviets were the weakest they were every going to be from not having finished preparing their defensive lines on the new border to the officer corps still being a mess from Stalins purges. They likely would have done worse if they invaded the next year, also they needed the Soviets oil and were running out of goods and tech to sell for it.
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