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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 recently went to Nanjing, visited the massacre memorial and watched Dead to Rights which is a recent Chinese movie about the massacre. What I find interesting about Nanjing is that there is a lively scholarly debate between numbers of dead. The Chinese government figure is 300k, some range closer to 100k and the Japanese stance is that it was purely collateral damage essentially.
Yet an argument between the 150k camp and 300k camp is something that takes place without anybody being accused of flat denialism.
Yup. When you bayonet a pregnant woman, the baby is collateral damage.
Not saying I agree with the Japanese but it is surprised how differently it is approached
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