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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.
From an alternative perspective: it is very dumb that people believe, as strongly as they believe any other mundane fact of reality, that ~3 million Jews were exterminated inside gas chambers that had been disguised as shower rooms, and that they were tricked into entering those death factories on the pretext of taking a shower. That is a very dumb belief; a very high confidence in an event that would constitute an outlier among historical outliers and lacks every shred of contemporary documentary and physical evidence that ought to exist if it were true. But people believe in a lot of very dumb things on the most thin basis of evidence. The Holocaust isn't even unique in this regard, it's just the Myth of the 20th century that you are required to Believe although it's a highly remarkable claim made on a very thin body of evidence.
That's because this line of arugmentation is True and the Belief in millions of Jews being tricked into walking inside gas chambers is nothing more than a religious mythos of the same vein of the Hebraic myths that cohered the Jewish people in the first place. It's the modern day Exodus myth.
very deep breath
…Look.
This is a caricature which you are taking over-literally to make the conventional narrative appear gratuitously absurd. I'm not saying nobody believes this dumb caricature, because lots of people's beliefs about history amount to dumb caricatures, just because they're more memorable - eg "Columbus was trying to prove the Earth was round". But weakmen aside, the serious historical claim is not that 3 million totally oblivious Jewish prisoners walked into what they guilelessly mistook for shower cubicles, like some sort of R-rated Road Runner cartoon. Why would the guards care whether the prisoners knew they were about to be murdered? The poor bastards weren't getting out, whatever they did or didn't figure out. It's an utter irrelevance. The deception, where it was employed, was a wafer-thin facade of plausible deniability, meant for the eyes of the outside world if it should ever come to that. And the sad thing is, it is in fact working as intended on those holocaust deniers who become obsessed with that particular data-point. We can only be thankful the rest of the world wasn't as easily fooled.
Take away that arbitrary sticking point, and the absurdity heuristic reverses. "So there was this regime of ruthless warmongers who slaughtered half of Europe on the battlefield in a quest for racial supremacy. Proponents of the regime's ideology hated the Jewish race most of all. Long before the party's founder had a shot at actually doing it, he wrote at length in his manifesto about how Jews needed to be exterminated. Once they'd taken over the country, these warmongering racists who thought Jews were a blight upon mankind organized a large-scale project to imprison all the Jews they could get their hands on and ship them abroad. And then they… made no attempts to kill them at all, actually???" It's a completely counterintuitive claim. The moment one quits harping on about the specifics of how the mass murder was achieved, it becomes blindingly obvious that of course mass murder would have occurred - that you would need huge amounts of evidence to prove anything else.
I think the most vaguely-plausible holocaust-denialism-shaped argument you could mount would be for a position along the lines of "although the Nazis absolutely intended to exterminate the Jews, they figured they didn't need the poison gas; they just packed the Jews in hellish work camps with no designated execution mechanisms, anticipating that they'd simply die in droves from starvation, squalor and exhaustion; and in point of fact, it worked out that way, hence the massive Jewish death toll we observe". But even if you argued that case convincingly, what would it prove? What would follow? "Your honor, my client did not poison that woman. That is a vile lie. I have documents here to prove that my client actually tied her up in his basement and left her there to starve, instead." This wouldn't change anything about the moral standing of Nazi Germany, it wouldn't change anything about how deserved the sympathy Jews get in Current Year based on the holocaust may or may not be relative to what their forefathers suffered in WWII - at most it would impinge on the commitment to the truth of the people who ran the trials, but again, who cares, "these actually-guilty murderers were convicted based in part on fraudulent claims regarding the methods employed" is not the great moral injustice of the 20th century.
And the same applies to quibbling about the numbers. I actually think it's plausible that the usually-bandied numbers have been inflated. But I said it once and I'll say it thrice: why the fuck would you care? "Hitler wanted to kill all the Jews" is not a claim that anyone can dispute with a straight face. Prove to me categorically that the Holocaust only killed, say, two hundred thousand Jews, and all you've told me is that the Nazis were incompetent as well as monstrous. And also it's still the mass slaughter of two hundred thousand human souls. None of this flips the narrative.
It is certainly not an irrelevance. Panicking crowds are very difficult to control, the notion that thousands of people were marched in orderly fashion inside narrow entrances into bedroom-sized "gas chambers" heavily relies on the mode of deception. This follows from that fact that all the alleged "gas chambers" were claimed to have been disguised as shower rooms, and that crowds of thousands of people were routinely marched inside without resistance on the pretext of taking a shower. This is the standard mainstream historical claim. The stories of panicking or resistance are suspiciously sparse.
The reason they would care is because normally people in a crowd of thousands being led to certain death would create panic, which would create enormous problems for the operation and the means attested to. This is especially problematic given the very small camps and number of personnel attested to: thousands of prisoners being managed by a very small security force- in the Holocaust mythos it is Jewish prisoners themselves who helped trick fellow Jews to their deaths.
The same could be said of the Allies... it was Great Britain and France who declared war on Germany and demanded unconditional surrender.
The actual historical events are not counterintuitive at all: Jews were concentrated into camps due to the belief that Jews would be detrimental to the German war effort for various reasons: espionage, partisan activity, etc. The Japanese were interned in America for the same reasons, and ethnic Germans were concentrated by Churchill also. In these camps Jews were made to perform labor to assist the German war effort. High fatalities in those camps followed mostly in the final months of the war when German infrastructure collapsed due to being bombed from all sides. This is a far more intuitive story than the mythos of millions of people marched inside gas chambers that had been disguised as shower rooms.
This is a claim that you could actually prove if any sort of written orders to this effect were ever given. But they were not. Even mainstream historians admit this. You can say "Hitler wanted this" but there's simply no evidence that this was ordered by Hitler. Hitler wanted the Jews out of Europe. This is true, and there are orders to this effect. There are no "kill all the Jews" orders that have ever been found. So you run into the problem where you claim "OBVIOUSLY Hitler wanted this", even though written orders for that have never been found, whereas there is ample documentation for planning and orders for actual German policy with respect to the Jews, and those orders align with the Revisionist interpretation and not the claim that millions were exterminated inside gas chambers that had been disguised as shower rooms.
How many Jews do you believe were exterminated inside gas chambers than had been disguised as shower rooms?
Color me unconvinced. I see your appeals to panic and I raise you despair. Capture hundreds of people off the street and immediately try to feed them into a gas chamber - yeah, you'll get riots. But abused, half-starved prisoners of an omnipotent-seeming war machine, shipped hundreds of miles from home to a forbidding camp surrounded by barbed fencing, with armed men watching you in all directions? By the time the guards are leading you to what you're pretty sure is the slaughter… call it irrational, call it a coordination problem, or call it weakness, but I am not at all surprised if few people ever bothered to try and make a run for it. To do so would have been heroism, not the expected human response. I would expect as much even if the gas chambers had had big neon signage saying 'DEATH CHAMBERS, ABANDON ALL HOPE YE WHO ENTER HERE'. We seem to have very different intuitions here.
Please reread the quoted claim you were replying to. It was not "Hitler, once in power, gave orders for all Jews to be killed". It was, in fact, "Hitler, even before he took over the country, wanted to kill all the Jews". This is true. It just is. He says so in Mein Kampf. He said so in speeches. He got in power in large part by promising to make the Jews pay (and the commies, and the Jewish commies). Hitler and his followers hated the Jews. They did not simply regard them as a practical hindrance to German prosperity, which could be dealt with as practicality allowed: they hated them, viscerally, and wanted them dead if possible, the more painful the better.
What I am doing here is establishing motive. Opportunity, I hope, speaks for itself.
My overriding question to you and anyone else who argues that the Holocaust didn't happen is: why not? Why wouldn't a regime who had spent decades painting Jews as a plague upon mankind, and found itself in the process of gathering them all up in faraway camps, take a stab at slaughtering them? It isn't as if pogroms were a new concept. You say Hitler merely "wanted the Jews out of Europe", but what do you think his plan was, exactly? Having shipped all those hundreds of thousands of Jews to eastern work camps, do you believe that his earnest intention was to win the war, then graciously release all those people and pay for their resettlement to the Middle-East? Why? What do you believe would have motivated Hitler to spend a single red dime on peacefully resettling them when he had all the makings of an extremely successful genocide at his disposal? It just doesn't make any damn sense unless you're trying to argue that the Nazis had some moral objection - that they valued Jewish lives and would have balked at attempting genocide. I don't know how to characterize that kind of claim, other than "hilarious".
Or was I wrong about opportunity speaking for itself? Are you so concerned about the crowd-control practicalities that you think organizing a successful Holocaust would have been too hard? But then we return to the "so what" angle. If you grant that Hitler would have organized the Holocaust if he'd had the means, and simply argue that he didn't because golly, the logistics were too goshdarn persnickety to crack… well, I'm not sure what you're trying to prove. "The Nazis were evil, but luckily, as it turns out, they were also morons" wouldn't be a bold world-changing revelation.
And here we go again. Please stop talking about the shower rooms. You believe the shower rooms are the crux of this whole matter. I don't. We will not get anywhere with this if you insist on reverse-motte-and-baileying me like this.
What do I believe? I believe that any Jews who fell into Nazi hands were systematically sent to camps from which they were never seriously expected to come out alive. I believe that this policy was not merely a wartime precaution against agitators, but a means of erasing Europe's Jewish population in the long term, as Hitler had long said he wanted. I believe that six million Jews died as a direct result of this policy, and that as far as the Nazis were concerned, this amounted to the policy working as intended. This is what any sane person would describe as "the Holocaust". Anything else, the method of the killings, the timeline of the killings - is commentary.
I believe, fractionally more weakly, that the official consensus on those details is directionally true if perhaps over-dramatized. But I could be completely wrong about that last bit - there could have been no fake shower rooms whatsoever - and it would not impinge on the bottom line that "the Holocaust", by any meaningful definition, happened, and happened on purpose.
No, defiance. Which makes it even less likely, because defiance requires being an asshat just out of spite, usually at the expense of yourself. And anyone who was so inclined had plenty of chances to do so earlier, and would have not been on the train.
Heroism requires that there is at least a slight chance of success, which there isn't really, with a single person acting alone.
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Your confidence just seems completely divorced from all human experience. We have innumerable examples of crowds panicking, often for no reason at all. The pure physical force exerted by hundreds of people in fear and the difficulty of controlling them is very well known. But you are confident that the Germans designed a murder operation that fundamentally required the cooperation of crowds of thousands of people walking inside their own execution chambers with hardly any security, and with them all knowing they were going to get gassed to boot. It's just absurd. It's not "weakness" it's just a tall tale about something that never happened.
Getting that many people into these narrow entrances to stand with extremely high density in these small rooms requires military-discipline level of coordination by the victims. That's the impetus for the whole "they were tricked into taking a shower" story in the first place, to provide an explanation for why ~3 million people coordinated so neatly in walking inside the gas chambers without resistance. But in your mind, they mostly knew they were going to die but just cooperated anyway.
You are asking why I believe this? Of course I believe this because there is an enormous body of evidence to believe that these were real policies, unlike the claim that the German plan was to murder all the Jews inside shower rooms. That is to say, I believe those things because there is a lot of evidence for them, and I don't believe the gas chamber story because it is an a priori outlandish claim that lacks evidence. The motive you mention is also explained by these policies, and if your claim is that the Germans departed from these long-standing policies and decided to kill them all inside shower rooms then that is a claim that requires more than appealing to motive.
The reason the gas chamber story is so important is because, if you say, "the Germans killed 6 million Jews" the natural follow-up from any thoughtful person is: when? where? how? why? The fact is, there is no "alternative hypothesis" other than the story of millions of Jews being gassed inside shower rooms. So if it turns out that claim is false (which it is) then mainstream historians are categorically unable to answer those other questions with respect to the Holy 6 million. The entire narrative rests heavily and solely on the truth of the claim that millions of Jews were gassed inside shower rooms. You can't hand-wave it away without being faced with those other questions that historians have no answer for whatsoever.
Ehhh, no. They could just make them walk in and then once the natural density has been reached, push more people in, and those people will push the people who are already inside, etc. This is also what they do for Japanese trains: https://youtube.com/watch?v=o9Xg7ui5mLA
What part of this requires military discipline? Do you imagine that the Jews marched in, in formation, and they took specific designated spots? What discipline is required to move when you get pushed?
For comparison, you can look at various tragedies at festivals, stadiums and such, where crowds got packed tight by people pushing from behind, which can easily cause extreme density at the far end. I'm not sure where you get the claim from that there was some extremely high density in the gas chambers anyway.
It seems to me that this is actually your problem if you reject the gas chambers, since then you need to account for where all those people went that provably disappeared. Where is your explanation?
Just like it actually seems to be you for whom the 6 million is Holy and it somehow matters if the actual number is 3 million, and those people where mostly executed by firing squads or gassed in trucks and box cars (but not gas chambers that looked like showers).
The evidence of the Holocaust is overwhelming, but you seem to believe that you merely need to prove one part wrong and then suddenly all that evidence will disappear.
It is claimed that up to/at least 2,000 people were gassed at a time in gas chambers that were by all accounts and according to construction documents (although they were documented to be Morgues) 7m x 30m. That means it is claimed there were stacked 9.5 victims per square meter. Here's an image to scale showing what that would look like. So you are saying the Jews stacked themselves like that even though they knew they were going to be murdered? You realize a person at the door pushing people inside would do nothing in the face of panic towards the door from a crowd like that.
You can watch this Revisionist film if you want to see a very well-sourced breakdown of the extermination process as claimed by mainstream historians. But yes the mainstream claims relies on the notion that Jews cooperated in arranging themselves with that much, or greater, density inside these structures. Through a single small entrance. Talk another look at that picture and tell me that this is a rational design for an extermination operation... it's just made up.
The people in the train want to reach their destination in a timely manner, they all have a strong incentive to accept being herded in that manner and if they didn't need to be there they would just go somewhere else. You are saying that the Jews would have exhibited the same level of cooperation as those Japanese train passengers but, instead of an attempt to take a train to get to work or whatever, to cram themselves inside their own execution chambers. I am saying they would not have cooperated like that. What exactly could the guy at the entrance do if the crowd inside the train panicked and all tried to leave the train at the same time?
Yes, crowd control is the most dangerous part of those events and when panic is caused for any reason it creates an incredibly dangerous situation for everyone involved. But you are saying the Jews would not have panicked, even though they knew they were being killed, and not only that but the Germans knew the Jews wouldn't panic so they didn't foresee an issue with a very light security detail simply telling thousands of Jews to arrange themselves inside the gas chambers.
No, it is not overwhelming. The lack of contemporary documentary evidence for the operation is one of the biggest problems, with probably the biggest problem of all being the lack of physical evidence.
First of all, I have no idea whether your 'it is claimed' actually reflects strongly held beliefs by historians. And my strongly held belief is that lots of historians take bad estimates by eye witnesses as gospel, or simply copy claims by other historians, no matter how weakly supported that claim is, or they just make stuff up that sounds good to them. There is a reason why a lot of sensible people try to validate historical records through practical methods.
Anyway, because of this, the more specific historical claims get, the more likely that they are wrong. And historical records get more believable the more independent evidence there is, and the more we stick to more generic claims. For example, I am a lot more confident that the Battle of Actium happened, than that the claimed number of ships and men are correct.
So my belief that the Holocaust happened and involved intentional mass murder and gas chambers is not based on a specific figure being correct that is allegedly being claimed, but because there is a lot of evidence all pointing in the same direction, supporting a much more generic claim, that is thus not dependent on a single data point being true. Your narrative that these people died due to food shortages and the like, does not merely require you to reason away the gas chambers, but also gas vans, the development of an odorless Zyklon-variant, the mass executions behind the Eastern Front, various experiments in clinics/camps early on, etc. Essentially, there is a very clear progression in the methods used, and a lot of independent evidence, which adds a lot of credibility to the claim that there was a plan to annihilate the Jews.
In contrast, your narrative of deaths due to chaos near the war's end, completely fails to explain such things as why such a small fraction of deported Jews survived, versus prisoners of war. Because if the Jews were not targeted but just victims of chaos, then logically, that chaos should impact all prisoners somewhat equally. And your narrative requires you to explain why there weren't a ton of bodies lying about. Because how does it make sense for there being mass starvation late in the war due to chaos, but for the Nazis to then still be able to neatly dispose of almost all of the bodies? And with immense speed, since it the deaths would occur over a much smaller period than in the Holocaust narrative.
According to your own image, 2000 people is actually quite possible if you have 30% children in the mix. You provide no reason why 30% children is the upper limit. In fact, we have records for a transport of 1,196 children and 53 adults. That is less than 2000 people, but I have no clue whether the figure of 2000 is supposed to actually have been reached, or whether it is a calculation.
Again, according to this reasoning it would be impossible for people to be pressed to death at a festival/stadium, because people would panic and press back again the people applying pressure. Yet we know for a fact that people get pressed to death in such circumstances, and that survivors report panic, but are unable to push back. So your narrative goes against established facts on how people behave.
I indeed think that it is quite plausible that malnourished, dehydrated people who had just suffered from horrible conditions during a long transport, and who know that they get beaten if they do not comply, act in a docile manner.
How could you know? Do you have experience being a person with 1940's Jewish culture, who has experienced a long train ride in a packed box car, and has been beaten by Nazis or has seen his fellows get beaten by the Nazis? Or are you just projecting your modern beliefs on the past?
It's my opinion that projecting modern beliefs on the past, rather than actually understanding how people of the time thought, is a huge cause for false beliefs of history.
I never claimed that there was no panic, or that the Jews knew that they would be killed before the Zyklon-B was administered. At that point the doors would be closed.
What I am claiming is that your narrative that panic must have happened at the moment and to such an extent that it would have prevented the people from being packed tight is being disproved by the fact that people do end up packed tight and unable to resist this, at festival/stadium tragedies where people get pressed to death.
You completely ignore that the Nazis scaled up their operations gradually. So your narrative that they gambled that thousands of people would revolt, does not match the historic record, where they experimented and learned what worked, and thus could simply scale down their security to a level that was sufficient, based on experience.
And it is a fact that occasionally, the Nazis did not actually know what security was sufficient, like at Sobibor, where there was a semi-successful revolt (but again, this was planned).
Yes, it is truly damning for the Holocaust narrative that there is no video where the Nazis demonstrate exactly how the gas chambers work. It's not like they had a policy of keeping it a secret, with them using code words, destroying the evidence, etc. And all the witnesses who gave testimony shortly after the war were obviously all coerced into making that testimony, even though there is a total lack of evidence for that coercion happening. It's utterly believable for there not to be a whole bunch of Nazis who would complain about that coercion if it had happened.
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there are also numerous examples of crowds-to-be-massacred not making any successfully resistance or 'mass panics' hindering the massacre. Barbed wire, physical violence, and machine guns are usually quite sufficient at crowd control. You and others in the crowd may panic, but if you are in enclosed space designed to prevent panicked prisoners escaping, 'panic' does not lead to successfully running away or overpowering the armed guards.
Suppose we discount all evidence from German operations. Pick aftermath of any 20th century civil war (Russia, Spain, Korea), some dozens of armed men can easily march a crowd of prisoners from a camp/prison to a place where they know they will be shot, have them dig a ditch, and shoot them. Rinse and repeat, and thousands have been killed during a single day. Soviets had zero trouble with prisoners panicking at Katyn. Many fled from Pol Pot's Cambodia to avoid death, but no mass panics of prisoners hindered the mass murder.
It is not beyond belief that same principles of crowd(-to-be-killed) control could have been applied to herd prisoners from train cars to a gas chamber.
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I assume you also think that every account of a prisoner being forced to dig their own grave is implausible? For instance, surely this old man was just blatantly lying about the atrocity he committed because it would make the victims look... better? Worse? I have no idea.
Of course if someone doesn't cooperate digging, you shoot him and it's a little inconvenient. A full-blown riot of a thousand people is a massive security threat to what is supposed to be a top-secret operation. The operation's reliance on the cooperation of the victims to function at all is so conspicuous. That's why the shower room cover story is so important. Such a sensitive task would not have, by design, fundamentally relied on the cooperation of the victims. That's where the shower room story comes into play, it's not just a small detail.
I don't understand your logic here. You seem to claim that when people are forced to dig their own grave, then any resistance is going to be individual and can be dealt with easily due to that. But when people are merely asked to walk into a room, then that would somehow set off a coordinated riot. Why? How?
Note that this doesn't make much sense anyway, since the separation of the Jews into workers and those who got sent to the gas chambers, would be a much more logical place to riot, when you have not just strength of numbers, but the most healthy & strong Jews would still be present. Women, children, the elderly and the ill would be over-represented in the group being sent to the gas chamber.
Which is why Sobibor was razed to the ground after the revolt. That was actually a carefully planned operation though, not a riot. And the workers of Sobibor were much more suitable for a revolt, being mostly healthy adults.
You have failed to explain why the Nazis would be particularly afraid of a riot by starved Jews who had been forced to stand for an average of 4 days, where many of those Jews would be women, children and the elderly, and where those Jews would have no particular reason to revolt then as they would not know the procedure at the camp (in fact, their previous 'arrive at a concentration camp' experience would have been at a non-extermination camp, so if anything they would assume that this is another camp where they would stay for a while).
Cooperation of the Jews with the Nazis has been documented every step of the way, so why would it be notable, or a weak spot in the narrative for that to also have happened at the extermination camps? The notable situations are when there was a revolt (Warsaw & Sobibor). And those were planned, not spontaneous.
Your narrative greatly suffers from double standards anyway. The Nazis also gassed some Jews in box cars. And Jews were packed tightly in box cars for transport. Yet you don't question the official story that has Jews being packed tight in the box cars for transport or for gassing, but suddenly when the Jews were packed tight in a gas chamber that looks like a shower, this required military discipline. Yet apparently no military discipline was required to be packed tight in box cars? And it was not logical for the Jews to revolt when being packed tight in the box cars, but somehow when being led to the showers, it is so unbelievable that they would not resist, that this supposedly undermines the entire narrative.
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No. I am asking you why you believe the Nazis would have bothered. Kindness? Saving face? The impracticality of genocide? What? There is nothing in Nazi ideology which remotely motivates going out of their way to help the Jews where killing them would have been cheaper, more straightforward, more popular with their core supporters, and more in line with Hitler's decade-spanning rhetoric. Any lip service paid to re-settlement plans strikes me as the paperwork equivalent of dad telling little Billy that he's driving Fido to a nice farm in the country.
Well, surely there has to be. Those millions of Jews did, in fact, die without ever seeing the gleaming shores of Madagascar. Your explanation for this seems to be that they were left to starve (in you view, purely by accident as supply chains deteriorated), which is what I analogized to a murderer turning out to have left his victim to starve to death in his basement, instead of poisoning her. That seems perfectly sensible to me; "lock them all someplace under armed guard, in cold and squalid conditions, don't give them enough food, and while you're at it, maybe extract some slave labor out of them for as long as they still have a bit of life on them, that way you'll recoup costs and wear them out faster" is a perfectly cromulent way to kill six million people. Slower than gas chambers, possibly more expensive as a result, but it would get the job done, given time.
I would much sooner believe that was the plan, than believe that Nazi Germany was ever prepared to allot significant resources to Jewish resettlement in the event of German victory. Granting no gas chambers, I think the most likely scenario is that resettlement remains the official policy for international PR purposes, but its implementation is endlessly deferred until an overwhelming majority of Jewish prisoners are found to have already died in custody, tsk-tsk, what a shame, our bad. And by then, everyone with a brain knows what really happened, but what are you going to do now, even if you disapprove?
Shouldn't you be asking that question? If their plan was to kill them all, why did they bother bringing them to all of these camps, feed them, give them shelter, etc.? Why didn't they just kill them? Jewish labor was crucial for the German war effort. If they were so intent on killing all the Jews, why didn't they pursue that before the war? Why did they enter diplomatic arrangements with Zionists and why did they go through the trouble of planning to transfer the Jews in Madagascar? It's up to you to explain why they planned to do that initially, but then changed their minds and decided to gas them all. But I'm struggling to understand why you're asking "why do you believe the Nazis would have bothered" when by all accounts that was the policy they were pursuing before the war and before 1942. I'm only saying they didn't radically shift their policy position in favor of some secret gas chamber conspiracy. If you are saying they changed their minds and drastically changed their policy you should be able to provide some evidence for that.
So you think the Havaara Agreement and Madagascar Plan were just fake or something? Or they were just cover stories? Why don't you believe they would have pursued a policy they were obviously pursing before and during the early part of the war?
The death toll in the concentration camps is not in the millions, I can't remember off the top of my head but it's overall <100k IIRC. That's why the gas chamber story is so important. You think it was Germany's plan to lose the war and have their infrastructure get completely destroyed from both fronts? That was their plan to kill all the Jews? The collapse of Germany was unplanned, and yes that created catastrophic conditions in the camps. It says more about your biases that you are more willing to believe the Germans planned the collapse of their infrastructure in order to kill the Jews than to believe that they would have pursued the policy they were pursing before the war and through 1941...
Huhuh. "This is how you deal with questions…"
I have counters to many points in that paragraph, some of which @Amadan has already fielded. But I think addressing them would distract me from pointing out that I asked you a very simple question and you are still refusing to answer it. Let me repeat it:
What do you think was going through Hitler's brain? If you're so convinced that right up until 1945 he totally wanted to deliver as many healthy Jews to Madagascar as possible, why do you think he was clinging to that plan instead of attempting the "annihilation of the Jewish race" which he had long promised his base, and was now in a position to deliver? I genuinely want to know. Do you think he didn't want a Jewish genocide? That he wanted it, but he didn't think he could get away with it? That the Madagascar thing was just easier? Tell me!
No, obviously not. I think that, if all else failed, their long-term plan would have been "put all the Jews in camps and, once we no longer need their slave labor, let them all starve". You can, in fact, deliberately let prisoners starve even if your infrastructure is just dandy. In this scenario, to the extent that the breakdown of German infrastructure forced their hand, it would simply have accelerated an outcome which was already in the cards long before.
All specifics aside, if you have hundreds of thousands of people in camps (even camps which had only been work camps up til that point!), it is just evidently quite easy and quite cheap to let them die. It is certainly easier and cheaper than shipping all those people from Poland to Madagascar.
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For no reason at all... It's funny you accusing me of not knowing history while you are either ignorant, or pretending to be ignorant, of the causes of World War II.
It's amusing how often you bring up these false equivalencies. Sure, we did indeed intern people of German and Japanese ancestry, and it's regarded today as a historical injustice. It was regarded as an injustice by many even at the time. Note that nowhere were all people of German and Japanese ancestry rounded up, in some states (like Hawaii, ironically enough) most were not interned at all, and the "camps" we put them in were, even in your "work camp" narrative, not remotely as bad as where the Jews were interned. Nor did we use them as slave labor or starve them to death. (No, they didn't only start dying when other Germans were starving.)
But you could at least make a colorable argument that there was reason to be concerned about the loyalties of Japanese and Germans who were generally no more than two generations removed from the homeland. Not a very good argument, in my opinion (though it was either you or some other Holocaust denier who gave it a try with the Japanese, a couple of years ago). I mean, if we went to war with China today I'm sure some Chinese-Americans would feel themselves falling under a cloud of suspicion. What exactly is the colorable argument for Jews? Why exactly would German Jews work for the Allied gentiles against the Axis gentiles?
So Hitler talked for years and made it a major part of his entire political movement that the Jews were rotten and must be gotten rid of, we have everything that happened after, but since there is no paper saying "Kill all the Jews. Signed: Adolf Hitler," we should conclude that Hitler planned to peacefully deport them to Madagascar after the war? That maybe in his heart of hearts he wanted to kill all the Jews (which he absolutely could have ordered and no Nazi would have blinked) but he didn't because he thought that would just be too mean, and there was never any plan or intent to do so? And all the dead Jews were just wartime casualties?
Let's say it's zero and the gas chambers are a complete fabrication. (They're not, but sure, I'll grant the number is much less than in the popular imagination.) Let's say the total number of dead Jews is far less than six million.
What would this prove? What should we conclude? That the Holocaust didn't happen? You worry at numbers as if casting doubt on the figures will debunk all the deaths. The reason no one with a good faith interest in accurately chronicling history is willing to engage in these arguments, even if there are good arguments that "six million" is an overestimate, is that the Venn diagram between "People who claim the Holocaust didn't happen" and "People who hate Jews and want us to consider Jews our racial enemy" is a circle. (Yes, yes, there are a couple of fringe Jewish historians you can point to as exceptions. There are black defenders of the Confederacy too.) Nobody autistically focuses on the exact number killed at this or that camp because they're concerned about accuracy, which means you have poisoned the well for historical inquiry on the subject. Which is unfortunate, but you know what you're doing and why you're doing it.
You keep accusing me of having a "religious belief" in the mainstream narrative, as if by motivated reasoning I refuse to consider the evidence, when your reasoning is motivated by a pseudo-religious intensity far greater than mine. I personally believe that you don't really believe the Holocaust didn't happen, but I am absolutely certain that if we did uncover a verified document signed by Adolf Hitler saying "Kill the Jews" and filmed and chemical proof of gas chambers no one could dispute (hah! as if), you would still argue that the Holocaust didn't happen and it's good that it did, you'd just change the vector of attack.
That's already kind of happening, at least in the Cleared communities. It's very difficult to not notice how many high-profile cases there are where it's Chinese-Americans selling out to China, and how few of any other ethnicity selling out to China (if you're vaguely white, you sell out to Brazil via a peanut-butter-sandwich information transfer mechanism).
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Amadan, it's not about whether it's justice or injustice it's about whether there's historical precedent for the practice. The concentration of the Jews is easily explainable without a grand conspiracy to exterminate them all inside gas chambers disguised as shower rooms. The alleged "extermination camps" have no historical precedent, whereas the concentration and labor camps alleged by Revisionists have ample historical precedent. The purpose of the comparison is to show which explanation is a priori more likely.
The Japanese performed labor in American concentration camps. Certainly the Russians had work camps. But what you are alleging, that some of these German camps were secretly death factories where hundreds of thousands to 1 million + people were exterminated using diabolical trickery to murder people who thought they were taking a shower... obviously that is the claim that stands far and wide from any other camp system in history.
The concern was primarily support for Communism among Jews. This was a concern shared by American intelligence as well who considered the mass of Jewish arrivals to be a security threat for the very same reason. The association of Jews with the Bolshevik Revolution was widespread and even accepted as conventional wisdom by Winston Churchill himself:
You are free to argue that this pattern is overstated by Churchill and the Germans. But we still have a more plausible explanation, and one that is stated by the Germans themselves, for the concentration of the Jews compared to "they had a secret, unwritten conspiracy to exterminate them all in death showers."
There's no need to understate that gravity of a mass deportation/expulsion from Europe. That is a huge, violent deal. It's not peaceful and I would never make that claim. But if you are trying to claim that the Germans were pursuing some policy, i.e. to exterminate all the Jews, it would make sense that there should be orders establishing this policy... how could this policy exist if it didn't exist in written orders? The actual, written plans make more sense from a logical and historical perspective. If the Germans wanted to kill all the Jews, why didn't they? Why bring them to camps with housing, food, medical services, etc.? Why not just kill them where they were found? But yes, if you are saying Hitler wanted to kill all the Jews it would be very helpful to show that he ordered such a thing, but those written orders have never been found because they do not exist...
I would actually volley this question back to you. Let's say Revisionists are correct: there were no homicidal gas chambers disguised as shower rooms. And that all the stories, propaganda, and pop culture which emerged from that mythos were false. What would you conclude? Would you just think "oh we all happened to get that historical fact wrong" or would you ponder greater Culture War ramifications from that revelation?
"We put people in camps, they put people in camps." They are only the same thing if you studiously avoid looking at any details at all.
Usually it takes until you come back after doing a fade from the last round before you start ducking arguments that have already been addressed, but here you are ducking the point @WandererintheWilderness already made in this thread. Characterizing those who believe the Holocaust is an actual historical event as "a grand conspiracy to exterminate them all inside gas chambers disguised as shower rooms" is the most superficial strawman of Holocaust history. As Wandering already pointed out, no one seriously thinks millions of Jews were herded like sheep through an assembly line into gas chambers. Gas chambers disguised as shower rooms were a small part of the entire multi-year process and obviously it's a horrific image that looms large today, but you can complain all you want that the number of Jews killed in gas chambers was small, or even literally zero, and you still won't "debunk" that Jews were deliberately killed in an attempted genocide.
No, it wasn't "primarily" that. Hitler had been preaching against Jews for years before that, and you know this, and you are not willing to address the specific things he said about Jews and their harmful effects on German society because "actually he was worried about Communist sympathies" sounds a lot better and more plausible than the actual reasons he hated Jews.
They had been rounding up Jews, stripping them of citizenship and property rights, and putting them in slave labor camps for years. They were very clearly pursuing a policy that could only end one way--supposing Germany had won the war (or at least ended it on terms that preserved their autonomy). What could they possibly have been planning to do with all these Jews they'd made unpersons, starved and enslaved, and been saying for years were poisonous vermin? You don't need a signed document from Adolf Hitler; the order to start killing them didn't even need to start at the top. I am not surprised no one thought it would be either prudent or necessary to put down in writing a formal, official plan to commit genocide. I don't know how many countries that have committed genocide that wrote down "We intend to exterminate all these people as a state policy."
Machine-gunning them in the streets would have presented a host of logistical problems, and they wanted to get slave labor out of them at first. It's even possible that at first Hitler believed he could win the war and deport them to Madagascar.
What do you mean by "all the stories"? The gas chambers, the human skin lampshades, the soap made from Jews, etc.? I have said before I have no problem believing that many of the more lurid stories we're all familiar with were exaggerated or even fabricated. I have no problem believing that the number of Jews killed might have been "only" 4 million, or 2 million. Now if somehow you could prove that in fact there were zero death camps, zero massacres, no plan to exterminate Jews at all, and all the Jews who disappeared from Europe were just normal wartime casualties or they got absorbed into Russia and other parts of Europe... well, that would require a hell of a lot of proof, and I've seen what you've presented on that score before, it's extremely unconvincing and transparently specious argumentation.
Of course Jewish organizations have a vested interest in either perpetuating, or at least not spending too much time examining the details, of such stories. Sure, there are Culture War implications. And once again I will circle back to the fact that if the well weren't so poisoned by people like you literally denying that there was any genocide at all (and low-key arguing that it was justified) maybe we could have frank and open historical inquiry into the matter. In a better and more honest world we could talk about Hitler's culpability and Nazi policy regarding the Jews, the same way we debate to this day how much knowledge and culpability Emperor Hirohito had in the actions of Imperial Japan.
But that better and more honest world would have to require some honesty on your part as well, and your motivations are fundamentally not honest because you don't actually care about the history, you care about the Jews.
I cannot recall where I read it, but as I understand there were early mass shootings (more organized than just in the streets, basically rounding them up first), but there was found to be a significant psychological effect on the soldiers doing the killings.
And the Jews also had a tendency to run away. Early on in the war, Jews fleeing further to the East was considered a benefit by at least one Ensatzgruppe leader, but I think that once they recognized that the war was not going well, they put more emphasis on killing the Jews quickly, rather than 'we'll get to it.'
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That would be the Einsatzgruppen.
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This claim has, in fact, been a huge part of my upbringing and education. You saying that "no one seriously thinks" it, is more radicalizing than anything SS could have ever said.
You were taught that every Jew killed in the camps was herded through gas chambers believing they were taking a shower?
I learned that was how a lot of them were killed (I couldn't tell you the numbers, I'd have to look up what non-denialist historians think it is now) but I was never told literally millions were gassed by deception.
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You are wrong Amadan, the mainstream historical claim is exactly that they were herded like sheep through an assembly line and fully cooperated the vast majority of the time. And saying it was a "small part" is also not true: it is claimed about half of the "six million" were murdered inside these shower rooms. And if you take lower estimates of the overall death-toll form mainstream historians like Hilberg, then the claim is that the overall majority of the Jews who died in WWII were killed in this way. It's not a "small part" and yes the mainstream claim is actually that they just willingly walked in like herded sheep through an assembly-line. That's not me strawmanning, that's the actual claim. The alleged cases of resistance are very few and far between compared to the multimillion death-toll alleged.
According to Yankel Wiernik, childrens' feet froze to the ground while they awaited their turn to be gassed. Although Wiernik does report on a case of heroic resistance:
At Treblinka it's claimed that the Jewish workers who ran the extermination operation revolted only after the murder operation of 800,000+ Jews because the workers "knew they would be next." At some point the lack of chivalry is just hard to believe.
What you are claiming the Germans did with their "extermination camps" is totally unprecedented in human history. That is not to say "genocide has never happened", it's to say that the establishment of secret camps with assembly-line/factory modes of extermination hundreds of thousand to 1 million+ using industrial means is not precedented in human history. The notion that this all happened without written orders, planning, or budgeting, it just somehow emerged organically from Hitler's rhetoric, doesn't hold water in comparison to the more likely explanation that the network of concentration and labor camps during WWII is perfectly consistent with German policy with respect to the Jews without the absurd stories of assembly-line death factories.
You notice I tried my best to address all your points, as tiresome as it is to tread this ground again since you'll just disappear and return with the same arguments in a couple of weeks. But as usual, you pick and choose a few points and ignore all the other holes that have been pointed out in your narrative. As I said to Arjin, my understanding is that large numbers of Jews were herded into gas chambers, but the majority of them were probably not marching in believing they were just showers. Was it 3 million who were gassed? 1 million? 100K? As someone pointed out above, in the case of the Rape of Nanking, good faith disputes about the exact numbers are possible, but good faith disputes about whether it actually happened are not.
If you proved to me that the Germans only gassed 100,000 Jews, I'd say "Wow, I wonder how historians got those numbers so wrong?" and I'd even consider "Certain groups had a vested interest in inflating them."
But you still would not have proved that the Nazis didn't gas large numbers of Jews in an attempt to exterminate them, which is what you are trying to claim.
In scale and industrialization, yes, which is why it's so memorable. In sheer cruelty and intent to exterminate a hated subpopulation, no, not really.
The camps were hardly secret, though what exactly was happening there was not widely known until after the war. See, you keep throwing out little "Hahaha how ridiculous that people believe such silly things" lines like this that are just straw men.
Again, this is ridiculous, no one is saying the camps were not planned or budgeted or there were no written orders about disposition of Jews. There may have been no written orders saying precisely "Kill all the Jews in your camp" or "Kill at least 1000 Jews per day." That doesn't mean it "emerged organically from Hitler's rhetoric."
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I think you have a rosy-tinted view of human nature. The talk of "panic" had a veil of objectivity, but "chivalry"…? I mean, I ought to thank you. What a gift of a word-choice! Because now I get to appeal to C.S. Lewis. Chivalry, he very correctly discerns, is not in fact a natural state of human nature. It is a demand made upon human nature by society for the sake of civilization. If you expect individuals in circumstances such as those faced by Jews in concentration camps to spontaneously act "chivalrously", and are genuinely surprised when they don't, then I'm not surprised you end up way off the map.
And I'd like to register my mild amusement that the current stage of the discussion could be described as "Nazi apologist refuses to admit that a majority of Jews could ever be spineless cowards".
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Why did they declare war on Germany? Was it just out of the blue, or was there a specific reason for it?
They declared war on Germany, ostensibly, because of the German-Polish war. But in reality they declared war because they didn't want a strong Germany to upset the balance of power in Europe. If liberating Poland was their real motive in their hearts of hearts, they failed miserably and destroyed Europe in the process. But there's ample historical evidence that the British for example essentially sabotaged German/Polish negotiation which would have averted war. And that the British rejected German peace offers that included Germany evacuating from essentially all of Western Europe. Accusing just one side of being "warmongers" is absurd but that's definitely part of the myth.
Shouldn't this speculation take into account the immediate preceeding events, ie. Germany and Czechoslovakia making precisely such an agreement to avert war with Western backing and Germany then proceeding to violate that agreement in the most flagrant of manners?
Germany did not violate the Munich Agreement. The Munich Agreement is not very long you can read it for yourself if you want.
The Munich Agreement rested on the idea that the cessation of Sudetenland would be followed by no further German aggression against Czechoslovakia. It was then followed by further German aggression against Czechoslovakia.
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I've never pretended the Brits didn't have their own ulterior motives (and their meddling in Greece towards the end of the war is ample proof of that) but there didn't need to be negotiations to prevent the war. Germany could have just, y'know, not invaded.
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