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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?
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.
Hacha voluntarily signed over independence. Hacha was the one who sought an audience with Hitler in Berlin, Hacha's concern was that the Benes faction were going to take over in Czechia, and they were going to start a war with Germany. It was not forced through German aggression. Nothing about the Munich Agreement stated that Hacha could not cede territory voluntarily to Hitler.
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