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He is explicitly saying that it did happen as commonly understood in the broad strokes, though, and the he is jewish himself. He just thinks it was more work camps were starving to death is considered a bonus, and less industrialized killing. Which is still something I disagree with - we have some evidence of the Nazis putting in much more resources into killing than would be reasonable in a war, especially towards the end - but it's hardly comparable to outright Holocaust denial.
"actually the survivors aren't credible and what happened is that they worked people to death for free labor but with no mass shootings, no mass gassings, no locking people into buildings and setting those buildings on fire, just very polite Germans extracting human labor until it dropped dead" is still holocaust denial actually.
Since the claim about the Holocaust is that Jews were targeted for extermination, not just abused as slaves and "incidentally" dying.
He also mixes in the claim that many fewer Jews died than is accepted by mainstream historians and that these numbers are inflated to suit the Zionist agenda, which is also holocaust denial.
Allow me to clarify. I think that most of the deaths in camps are due to malnutrition and disease. It's also demonstrably the case that Jews in camps often received high-quality medical treatment and had access to all sorts of pleasant recreational facilities, which certainly doesn't make things okay, but does cast some doubt on the narrative that the whole point was to kill them.
FWIW my guess is that had the Nazis won (and stayed winning) Jews would have been expelled to colonies as ~slaves, generally whittled down by social and economic oppression, and in the long run probably mostly exterminated one way or another, yes. For obvious reasons I'm not a fan of this outcome.
However -- a whole lot of deaths did happen outside the camps. Neighbor on neighbor violence, pogroms, groups of Jews (and other political prisoners) quietly gunned down in the woods when transporting them became inconvenient, etc.
Are you disputing that inflating the numbers suits the Zionist agenda, or are you disputing that the institutions which would do so had many incentives to do so and few if any incentives not to?
Feel free to walk away from the conversation at any time if this is stressful to you btw; I'm not hounding you, didn't initiate conversation with you, and am at this point responding because you're responding.
This seems to violate "Proactively provide evidence in proportion to how partisan and inflammatory your claim might be."
This is not by any means a fringe assertion — I'm unaware of any mainstream historian or institution which disputes the matter, and you can easily google it and learn from whatever source you find credible — and one person on a forum claiming that it's partisan and inflammatory does not make it so.
Though I'll add that this sort of treatment was much more typical of the early days. It makes sense. Healthy slaves are productive slaves. It all seems to have gone out the window once resources got thinner.
What am I supposed to Google? I tried medical care in concentration camps and got : https://www.auschwitz.org/en/history/camp-hospitals/conditions-in-the-hospital/ and https://perspectives.ushmm.org/collection/medical-care-nazism-and-the-holocaust
As first results, neither of which corroborates your statement.
When I search for recreational facilities in concentration camps, I find this:
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/654671/summary
And this
https://www.auschwitz.org/en/education/e-learning/podcast/sport-and-sportstpeople-/
If it's so easy to search and find please tell me what to search for.
I have to eat my words on this one, though my opinion is unchanged.
The last time I seriously looked into this was circa 2005. When I go looking now the results are incredibly one-sided. As such, my tone and attitude were inappropriate and I apologize.
Yet I clearly remember many, many accounts of Jews getting decent healthcare -- self-reported, mind, not according to the nazis. My expectation is that the truth has shifted outside of the overton window and sources which might paint nazis in a more nuanced light have been deprecated. Certainly this would be in keeping with google's general ethos re: filtering search results.
This will understandably not be very convincing to you, but integrity dictates that I owe you a response.
If you're feeling up to it, I'd still like a response too:
And, if neither, what makes you think the numbers are sound?
So you're not going to update your belief despite not being able to provide a single source corroborating it except a vague recollection that two decades ago you saw proof of it that you definitely, at the time, thoroughly investigated to make sure was reliable? You could at least make a token effort to dig it up if you've been spending years casually asserting every respected expert in the field knows life in the concentration camps included excellent medical care and recreational facilities.
Why would inflating the numbers make any difference? What would the incentive that you're hinting at be? If the Nazis deliberately murdered 4 million Jews instead of 6 that suddenly changes things?
The numbers are an estimate in any case, because the scale of the murder was so vast they have to be. It was certainly not a round 6,000,000.
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