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I don't really want to do this, but I had another family member confess to me that he denies aspects of the Holocaust, so I'm going to make another one of those threads. I'm sorry. At least it's on the last day of this particular thread.
Before I get into this: most Holocaust denial is kind of dumb. My dad had me listen to this podcast a year or so ago, and there were some really stupid theories in that. Namely, that Hitler did literally nothing wrong. Claims that those Jews actually did stab Germany in the back with rioting, that they actually were breaking Germans with their banking stuff and their horrible lending schemes, that Hitler was profoundly Christian, that Hitler actually really just wanted peace and tried desperately to make peace only for the war-loving British to decline because they hate Christians, that Poland was extremely necessary both for farmland and to stop the mistreatment of ethnic Germans, and then further claims that Jews comprised the USSR and put Christians into gulags. Also Dresden and Hiroshima and Nagasaki were all destroyed for being true holy places for Christianity. Also Jews are genetically evil because they killed Christ and called down a blood curse upon themselves. Many Holocaust deniers are similarly terrible weakmen for the cause.
But I have to make this post because despite all sorts of bad argumentative tactics on that side, if they commit to a specific kind of Holocaust denial, I can't really refute it. It goes like this: Germans only forced Jews into work camps, there were no death camps. All the death camps were on the USSR side for a reason, and there were no Americans who investigated them. Hundreds of thousands of Jews died, but 6 million is far too much, and the Nuremberg Trials were show trials.
I know of a few things that refute this: the Posen speeches, a certain Nazi who fled to South America and wrote about the Holocaust without prompting, and the likely absence of a particularly large number of Jews. But I don't know why the death camps were all on the USSR side. Why were the death camps all on the USSR side? There are probably answers that don't involve anything too crazy.
I also am aware that it's pointless to contradict most Holocaust deniers, because they generally are willing to spend a lot more time than you on the subject, and they also are unwilling to accept any evidence I have, anyway. I once blindsided my dad with the Posen speeches, who had not heard of it. He actually didn't deny the veracity right away, but questioned what Himmler was really talking about, because the evidence just wasn't there for him that they could possibly kill that many Jews. I was pretty sad for getting so close, but not quite reaching the destination.
I think it's intrinsically suspicious when Holocaust deniers trying to make their case immediately lead off with "here's why the Jews would have deserved the Holocaust if it happened... which it didn't FYI."
Weirdly enough, they bear a familial resemblance to those progressives confidently asserting that Palestinians have a right to engage in armed resistance against their oppressors - but coincidentally, 100% of the Israeli civilians killed on 07/10/23 were killed by the IDF under the Hannibal directive, and any footage clearly depicting Hamas squaddies murdering Israeli civilians is obviously AI-generated.
Yeah, I was struck by that listening to that podcast. They go into all the reasons why Jews are the worst people in existence, and then they use it as a point in how the Germans were truly really great people for not genociding them, even though they would have been completely justified in doing so. I even asked him about "untermensch" and he said it never got written down. Bullshit.
On the progressives point, it never struck him as ironic that he was agreeing with them so much, he just thought this was one instance where they were right.
"Untermensch" was certainly written, unlike the highly notorious "Master Race" which was never written nor part of popular propaganda. But "untermensch" was not a racial categorization, it was basically a designation for communist sympathizers and an inversion of "ubermensch."
In this comment I included difficult-to-find translations of that propaganda. The concept of "untermensch" is no different than what people today might call something like "bio-Leninism" and was not a racial categorization.
Right, "volk" is not the German word for "race". There are sparse references to "Herrenvolk" although it was very uncommon, and no references to "master race."
Volk is often used as a metonym for Rasse, though, or just used interchangeably due to semantic sloppiness. I wouldn't read too much into it.
The notoriety of the "Master Race" is supposed to be the most extreme invocation of scientific racism. That is not to say that the Germans did not believe in scientific racism (they obviously did), but the few cases of the use of "Herrenvolk", which was not common in popular propaganda and would not have been in the minds of the general public, is more in the context of this statement here of "raising the German people up" to reach their potential. The Nazis and Hitler in particular viewed the concept of "German" as multi-ethnic in itself. Rosenberg in particular did not go along with the interpretation of "Master Race" manufactured by the Allies at Nuremberg:
This is also seen in the fact that "untermensch" is translated as "subhuman", which is not a good translation in comparison to "underman"- the inverse of the Nietzschean Overman. So that concept of "untermensch" is misrepresented, mostly through manipulative translation, to make the concept about racial supremacism when it was about a deeper political and ideological struggle.
I do actually take the point that "subhuman" is an imperfect translation, but I think a part of the story you're missing is that the received translation for Übermensch itself in the first half of the 20th century was "Superman", not "Overman". That only changed when the guy with the red cape became so famous as to make the term hard to take seriously in a grown-up context - thank heaven no serious philosopher had invested pivotal significance in the Spinnemensch or the Fledermausmensch. The upshot of which is that at the time the "subhuman" translation emerged, it would not have been intuitive to coin "Undermen" to translate it, because there was no "Overman" to base it on. Instead, you would look at "Superman", which used the Latin prefix "super", and find its antonym, which happens to be "sub". But "Subman" sounds absurd, like a comic book character who can turn into a submarine, and anyway "human" is in fact a more precise translation of the gender-neutral Mensch than "man" is.
End result, "subhuman", a questionable translation but not I think a deliberately manipulative one when it was coined.
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