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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.
Is it really dumb to believe that people believe in dumb ideas? Don't you see people all around you that do so? Why would the Jews of the past be immune to wishful thinking and the like?
Note that information spread much more difficult in the past, and there especially was much less hard evidence (photo, video, etc) in the first place, and the hard evidence there was could not just be put on the internet in one location, where others could then see on the other side of the world. It's not like today where the media (and often by extension governments) are increasingly upset that their ability to control public perception is much less than in the past. For it to be very dumb to think that shower rooms that look like shower rooms, are not actually shower rooms, one would need more than just a general idea that people were killed, and even more than an idea that gas was used, but to have an understanding of the procedure. Otherwise they could very easily see this as just a precursor to being placed in a concentration camp (where disease risk is very real, of course), not as the actual killing procedure.
Imagine that those gas chambers actually did exist as claimed. Then how do you reckon that people that were being transported in from very far away, would come to know how the procedure was done?
So where did all the Jews go from countries that kept very accurate record about their population? And are all of the witnesses who gave testimony about the Holocaust part of a big conspiracy? What is your position even? That there was mass murder, but not with gas? Or do you deny mass killings in general?
But the Jews are historic outliers! Throughout the ages they have faced persecution like no other race. And historically their culture was not one of fighting back or establishing their own country, but accepting oppression, fleeing, etc. The Nazis took advantage of this by establishing Judenräte and Jewish leaders were all too eager to participate in this, based on the idea that working with the Nazis would cause them to be nicer.
Where most people would figure out after a persecution or two that they might need their own country under their own rule, the Jews clearly didn't think this way for a very long time.
That said, this culture was already in the process of changing at the time, which is why what would later become Israel was already in the making when WW2 started. However, the Jews that moved to Mandatory Palestine would actually remove Jews with a willingness to fight back from the Diaspora, so the remaining Jews would be less prone to fight back, if anything.
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