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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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