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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.
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.
Do you really, honestly, not see a difference nce between these statements?
Okay, I will rephrase:
You were taught that millions of Jews were herded through gas chambers believing they were taking a shower? Or is the "herded like sheep" line you are taking issue with? Wandering already covered this pretty well: the conventional narrative is that millions of Jews were indeed gassed, and probably most of them knew what was happening. (Argue as you wish about coordination problems and why that happened.) SS is trying to make it sound silly by claiming that this narrative is that they all just tralalaed into what they thought were showers.
Yeah, pretty a much. Every trip to a concentration camp museum focused on elaborate descriptions of the unusually cruel and/or underhanded methods of execution. They were very much attempting to paint a picture that this was representative of the Holocaust writ large.
This wouldn't be the first time in the history of man that a ruling regime thought "the commonfolk are too simpleminded to grasp the nuances of the truth, so we have to teach it in a form they can digest", nor would it be the first time that subversives exploited that to turn those among the commonfolk who can grasp the nuances against the regime. When the latter is happening, a reaction like "no one serioisly believes that", is possibly the worst response you can have.
Okay, I cannot say what your schooling was like. Maybe I am wrong that "no one seriously believes that" but I don't think that is a serious historical claim. Millions of Jews murdered, yes, Millions of Jews murdered with gas, yes. Millions of Jews who all thought they were taking showers, it obviously couldn't work, even in one camp. (Thousands go in, no one comes out, do the guards just tell everyone else they were loaded into buses in back and sent to another camp? Just the first of many logistical problems that make this obviously implausible.)
Is this what normies out in the world believe? I dunno.
For what it's worth, my recollection from high school was broadly, "millions of Jews were killed, these are some of the ways in which it was done", and gas chambers were just one of the methods listed.
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