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Just wanted to comment I'm really keen for responses to this one.
Seeing made up atrocities arise as a way to score points in the propaganda war and then get debunked in realtime, as well as reading "Iron Curtain Over America" by Beatty really shook my belief in any of the stories of German atrocities. It seemed obvious to me that without the internet "40 beheaded babies" would have just become sacrosanct and in a few decades denial of it would have been criminalized in the west.
Once you see the exact same institutions that ran public opinion in the 40s doing it, it becomes very hard to imagine they weren't doing the exact same thing in the 40s when the brazenness of the propaganda was infamous and is even parodied by everyone down to children's movies today.
The story of the boy who cried wolf has two sides. It's not just a lesson for the boy not to lie, it's a lesson for the villagers too. Just because people who lie about wolves exist doesn't mean wolves don't exist.
Also most historians think the German atrocities in Belgium during the first world war did happen, even if they were exaggerated at the time.
What about Japanese war crimes? Did those never happen either? What about Unit 731? Why would the United States make up fake war crimes only to become complicit in them later by trading the data produced by the research in exchange for immunity?
Notably none of those examples needed laws to jail people for questioning them nor were placed at the center of the American civic religion.
Ask what is most sacred in a society, and thats the most likely place you'll find the big lie.
You don't need to worship Newton's laws of motions BECAUSE they are amongst the largest revelation of pure truth in history. They hold regardless of your belief.
Likewise we do not need to worship Alexander or Napoleon for them to be major main characters in our history, revered despite being basically glossed over in our schools.
When it comes to Christ however, suddenly your faith really matters, because unless you believe he rose from the dead he stops being the greatest man in history and instead becomes a Schizophrenic unfairly denied a lawyer who'd put forth an insanity plea.
Thus it's really telling that this historical event and this historical event alone, unique amongst even genocides, it is DEMANDED that schools teach it happened AS MORAL MATTER, that unbelief is the ultimate sin.
We don't treat Holomordor this way, nor the killing fields, nor the plight of the Armenians, Hell in America and Europe you can argue that the Native Americans actually didn't have it that bad, or that slavery was the equivalent of the Russian serfs or just having a job, without being imprisoned in Austria or Germany.
This doesn't really compute. Claims about Armenians or Native Americans or the slavery in the US never had been a politically important topic in Austria and Germany. After the war, the arguments to the effect "Nazis were actually good guys / or better than the other guys in charge now / and all claims of their wrongdoings are lies" were politically important.
The equivalent question in the US context would be, dunno, debates about teaching evolution and creationism in the schools? There have been substantial efforts to have only one of the two included in the curriculum by disagreeing partisans. Extremely partisan behavior can be observed: many an internet atheist argued that teaching evolution is the truth, thus it is moral imperative to teach it happened (and equally imperative not to teach creationism). If given the power, some people would mandate it by law. Despite their moral posturing, the scientific evidence from archeology through biology to genetics is overwhelmingly supportive of the evolution.
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The fact that dissent is suppressed is a piece of evidence, but not a conclusive one.
Edit to elaborate:
The question "why is saying this unpopular thing illegal when saying all those other unpopular things isn't illegal?" has more than one possible answer.
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Germany actually recently did criminalize denying genocides in general and has also recognized the Holodomor as a genocide.. Holodomor denial is, unsurprisingly, already directly criminal in Ukraine, and the general denial of Communist crimes is criminalized in several Eastern European countries. By your logic, this should make you equally, or almost equally likely, to question whether the said Communist crimes happened.
The new push(well, one of them) in American school curricula is the crimes of communism, too.
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Most of the modern understanding of the Holocaust emerged in the 1980s, not merely long after the war and long after Israel's founding and long after the Germans had agreed to reparations but even after Israel's major existential wars to date, the last of which ended in 1973. While the Holocaust certainly serves as one of the reasons some Zionists argue for Israeli statehood, it was never (and still is not) the primary argument embraced by Jewish or gentile Zionists.
Well, I would say that’s going a bit too far.
The Zionists believed and believe Jews need their own state because anything else leads to persecution. The Holocaust was the large cherry on top of a cake of centuries of persecution in Europe, so it’s the ultimate proof of the theory.
As counterfactual histories go, if the US had allowed Jewish immigrants at scale the way we do now (legal or not), I’d bet Israel never gets founded because so many of the founding generation would have made a different choice.
I mean yeah, the Yiddish Policemen’s Union is kind of about this scenario. There were already many settlers in Palestine in 1939 and the relationship between Zionism, the Arabs, Arab nationalism and decolonization would have been so different it’s hard to say. I think they would still have tried for a two-state solution but they might have been overrun.
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It's an interesting question why no seemingly no one was interested in it in the 1950s.
If anyone has an idea, let me know.
As I wrote in my other reply, the delay is quite common. As a comparative example of unrelated WW2-era atrocity, Wikipedia article about Korean comfort women suggests that the Korean-Japanese debate and activism about comfort women in particular (opposed to Korean forced laborers and compensation in general) gathered steam in the 1980s and 1990s.
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The vast majority of survivors wanted to move on with their lives and never discussed it, often even with their children. The popular memory of the war was about heroic national successes - the French resistance, the Battle of Britain, Iwo Jima and D-Day, tank battles in North Africa, daring prisoner escapes from German POW camps - not the camps. The vast majority of the camps and places of origin of the victims were behind the Iron Curtain.
The Cold War became a news priority. The moguls who ran postwar Hollywood didn’t think anyone would be interested in depressing stories about Jews and, where they were interested in inculcating philosemitism among the masses preferred stuff like Ben Hur. (The 1959 Anne Frank movie also bombed iirc.) The Allied powers were interested in rehabilitating much of the German right to ward against communism domestically, rehabilitating the great majority of former party members, SS officers and so on, while the East Germans avoided teaching it entirely to fit with the state’s narrative of a great people rescued from fascist Bavarian capitalists by the Soviet Union. The Israelis wanted quite explicitly a new identity that didn’t reflect on being weak and pogrom’d in Europe, the organized Jewish community was more concerned with helping Israel which was under great regular threat through this period, and in any case the Holocaust was of little immediate relevance to the streaming flows of Arab and North African Jews who flooded into Israel in the late 1940s and 1950s.
Things began to change in the late 1960s because part of the German ‘68 movement in that country was about confronting your parents about what they actually did in the war, which became a big thing in that generation and changed the way WW2 was taught in West Germany. Then in the 1970s and 1980s more American Jewish authors started writing about the holocaust, more children of survivors became interested, and over time media that became influential like Shoah increased awareness of it. The tireless publicity efforts of people like Simon Wiesenthal contributed. Over time as American Jewry secularized, it became an ever more central part of Jewish religious identity. In Israel, where there had been a lot of resentment toward survivors who moved to Israel without wealth or possessions (often even in the press) the narrative gradually shifted away from ‘this is something that happened to them’ and toward ‘this is something that happened to us’.
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The Holocaust barely even rated as wartime propaganda. The extermination of eastern European Jews was almost entirely absent from newspapers, films, and broadcasts in the Western Allied countries. The bombings of Rotterdam and London and the Lidice Massacre had a vastly greater presence in the minds of the Allied public than Treblinka or Majdanek or even Auschwitz, let alone the Einsatzgruppen shootings. If the Holocaust was spun by "the exact same institutions" to gin up war fever they did a pretty shitty job of it.
What exactly in Beatty's book made you think the Holocaust didn't happen? IIRC he barely even talks about this. It's mostly your standard issue Bircher stuff but with the anti-semitism made explicit.
Holocaust was a furtive, secretive policy of getting rid of millions of useless mouths deemed to be dangerous, and contain and destroy through labour fit adults of the same ethnic.
Rotterdam was obviously very public. It doesn't get more 'public' than flattening a major city. Lidice were a punitive measure meant to scare Czechs. If it had been kept secret, it'd not have worked.
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He was a US Intelligence Officer of the Rank of Lieutenant-Colonel during WW2, wrote the reports on Decrypted Germans Cyphers, briefed Generals...
And he wrote a book about Jewish involvement in Communism and their ties to the Soviet union... Full Putin-esque deep dive on the Germans back to the Tuetonic Knight and the Jews back the Khazaria 800bc- 1952... And he mentioned the holocaust once as an off-handed "And there are still some people who still believe this ridiculous wartime propaganda by jewish lobbyists"
And a half Dozen US Generals wrote glowing reviews saying it was the most important book of the 1950s and exactly captures the truth of the Second world war.
Likewise Eisenhower, Churchill, and De Gaulle make no mention of the holocaust or final solution in their thousands of pages of works on ww2.
You'd think if out of 80 million dead in ww2, 6 million were jews, you'd get like 5-8% of time dedicated to it... just proportionately?
Nope. Nothing. In the 1950s they didn't act as if the camps were opened and the revelation of the greatest crime in history had just been revealed. The Holocaust only entered public consciousness in 1967 after the 6 day when the US pivoted to Israel.
I know, I read the book a long time ago, but I didn't remember him saying much about the Holocaust, which you just confirmed for me.
There were thousands of US generals during the Second World War. Who cares if six of them signed off on Beatty's book?
Beyond the fact that this meme isn't even true (I don't know where it came from. I think the first time I saw it was in Ron Unz's "American Pravda." Did he make it up?), and Churchill at least does mention the mass killings of millions of Jews, so what?
Most people, even western Jews, did not actually care that much about the misfortunes of Jews in eastern Europe. Not even the Soviets particularly cared. I think most of Curtis Yarvin's stuff is stupid but he's right when he says that Hitler was the only person of note during the war itself who actually thought massacring millions of impoverished Polish and Belarusian shtetl Jews was some kind of epic world-historical battle between light and darkness rather than a mostly irrelevant sideshow.
Why? Did you painstakingly go through the works of Churchill, Eisenhower, and De Gaulle, find that every instance of mass death during the Second World War which you agree happened is mentioned in direct proportion to its share of the total 80 million dead, and note a glaring exception in the case of the Jews?
So what are you actually arguing? The Holocaust was made up in the 60s? That isn't even the "steelman" denier position, which acknowledges that the bulk of the evidence emerges during the war itself and soon afterwards, they just find increasingly creative ways to insist it's fake or otherwise doesn't matter.
Have you tried assess the evidence for the Holocaust, whether through reading historical books on the topic or denier literature, or preferably both? Or are you just kind of squinting and going "idk seems made up."
Your brand is "based right wing edgelord who makes leftists mad" so I fully expect that if you ever do get around to reading the Castle Hill, Mattogno, Graf, stuff you will be very eagerly and easily convinced by their arguments, but at least do that before going "Holocaust fake because Churchill didn't mention in this book."
You do realize it's actually fairly trivial to find the digital version Ctrl-F for every reference of "Jew" "final solution" "holocaust", Etc.
And I did. I checked Unz work.
Eisenhower does actually mention a holocaust in crusade in europe. Specifically a "Bomber's Holocaust", carried out by the allies against the germans. But nothing about a mass extermination of jews, only that when released from the work camps they and all the other prisoners were starving from lack of food, largely because German logistics had collapsed.
In a press conference Eisenhower gave in 1945 he said the following: "When I found the first camp like that I think I was never so angry in my life. The bestiality displayed there was not merely piled up bodies of people that had starved to death, but to follow out the road and see where they tried to evacuate them so they could still work, you could see where they sprawled on the road. You could go to their burial pits and see horrors that really I wouldn't even want to begin to describe. I think people ought to know about such things...It is something we have been trying desperately to find out, whether or not the German population as a whole knew about that. I can’t say. It does appear, from all the evidence we can find, that they were isolated areas and this one piece of evidence that the mayor being shown the thing and going home and hanging himself would indicate he didn’t know about it. On the other hand, what makes the story so thin with me is when we find these very high ranking Nazis denying knowledge of it. If they didn’t, they deliberately closed their eyes, that is all. As far as I’m concerned these people are just as guilty as anybody else – those high ranking Nazis – but I think it would be impossible to say, however, the German nation knew it as a whole. But a lot of them know it, because I told them to go out and give them a decent burial. We made a film an hour long and we have made many Germans look at it, and it is not pretty."
In a military cable to General Patton in 1945, Eisenhower wrote the following: "We continue to uncover German concentration camps for political prisoners in which conditions of indescribable horror prevail…I have visited one of these myself and I assure you that whatever has been printed on them to date has been understatement. If you would see any advantage in asking about a dozen leaders of congress and a dozen prominent editors to make a short visit to this theater in a couple of C-54s, I will arrange to have them conducted to one of these places where the evidence of bestiality and cruelty is so overpowering as to leave no doubt in their minds about the normal practices of the Germans in these camps.
And, of course, in his autobiography Crusade in Europe Eisenhower wrote the following (page 446):
"The same day I saw my first horror camp. It was near the town of Gotha. I have never felt able to describe my emotional reactions when I first came face to face with indisputable evidence of Nazi brutality and ruthless disregard of every shred of decency. Up to that time I had known about it only generally or through secondary sources. I am certain, however, that I have never at any other time experienced an equal sense of shock.
"I visited every nook and cranny of the camp because I felt it my duty to be in a position from then on to testify at first hand about these things in case there ever grew up at home the belief or assumption that “the stories of Nazi brutality were just propaganda”. Some members of the visiting party were unable to go through the ordeal. I not only did so but as soon as I returned to Patton’s headquarters that evening I sent communications to both Washington and London, urging the two governments to send instantly to Germany a random group of newspaper editors and representative groups from the national legislatures. I felt that the evidence should be immediately placed before the American and British publics in a fashion that would leave no room for cynical doubt."
In the same book, on page 480, he wrote the following while discussing displaced persons (DPs) after the war:
"Of all these DPs the Jews were in the most deplorable condition. For years they had been beaten, starved, and tortured. Even food, clothes, and decent treatment could not immediately enable them to shake off their hopelessness and apathy. They huddled together — they seemingly derived a feeling of safety out of crowding together in a single room —and there passively awaited whatever might befall. To secure for them adequate shelter, to establish a system of food distribution and medical service, to say nothing of providing decent sanitary facilities, heat, and light was a most difficult task. They were, in many instances, no longer capable of helping themselves; everything had to be done for them."
And again on page 481:
"Of all the distressing memories that will for ever live with American veterans of the war in Europe, none will be sharper or more enduring than those of the DPs and of the horror camps established by the Nazis."
As you can see, in his autobiography he does not blame the deplorable condition of the Jews in the camps as being the result of a breakdown of logistics but on "Nazi brutality and ruthless disregard of every shred of decency" and as the result of years of being "beaten, starved, and tortured" in "horror camps".
Starvation and "beatings" prove nothing.
Those are the conditions that existed in the Gulags in peace time, the conditions that existed in the british concentration camps for the Boer, and the conditions that would have existed in the concentration camps for Japanese Americans if America had lost the war and had its supply chains and rail networks destroyed by bombing.
The Claim of "the holocaust" is that the Germans uniquely set out to kill every jew in Europe, did so on an industrialized scale and with an efficiency never seen before in human, history, and that it is in a category of horror beyond any other genocide to ever exist including the Great Leap forward, Hoomodor, the Killing Fields of Cambodia, and CERTAINLY worse than the Soviet mass killing and expulsion of the German Diaspora post 1945.
Nothing in "Crusade in Europe", Churchhill's "Second World War", or De Gualle's "Memoires De Guerre" suggest anything of the sort.
Indeed all of them portray the Camps as workcamps for enemy aliens (like the camps for Japanese-Americans) that collapsed and lost life support function during the onslaught of war.
Reading this claim is weird given you are replying to the very quotes from Crusade in Europe that are not "nothing" after you first argued there would be no quotes like them in the book.
One doesn't need advanced degree of historiography to realize that Eisenhower and Churchill have all the reasons to not care too much about Holodomor or German victims of Soviet brutalities or Boer victims of British concentration camps. Naturally neither can't make comparisons to Cambodia or Great Leap Forward because they had not happened yet in 1948.
All of that "uniquely", "efficiency never seen before" stuff sounds something from History Channel and makes your argument is strawman-ish. Yes, unfortunately, some people have habit of talking about the historical events involving death with as dramatic words as possible while scary music loops in the background (see exhibit A, History Channel). However, gesturing at drivel and pointing out that it exists is evidence about the drivel, but not much else. The question being debated is not the uniqueness or the efficiency never seen before (mostly not the special status of the Holocaust in popular consciousness either): the question being debated is how many people died and how and when. If the overdramatic claims concerning the Holocaust inflate its relative scale compared to other mass deaths, the overinflated assessment of uniqueness and efficiency is not evidence people did not die.
Unrelated to any claims Eisenhower made or any reports he sent, according to the statistics and documentary evidence, the major portion of mass killing of Jews happened in the East. Places that are not Gotha. Eisenhower went to places like Gotha. However, the claims indicate that he wanted to report that he was horrified by things he did see,
In general, it is not particularly suspicious Eisenhower and Churchill and De Gaulle (I admit I have little idea what De Gaulle wrote) discuss atrocities targeting Jews in fewer than 5% printed words (1). People tend to ignore and forget and not learn in the first place about atrocities that are not personally relevant to them. The general pattern is that until the advent of modern electronic mass media, it took decades for any atrocities to became widely known and people to care about them. Nobody in the West cared about the Armenian genocide when it happened or soon afterwards. It became only known when Armenians managed to gain some international prominence with their complaints about the past genocide. When the Holodomor was happening, the West considered it a famine like other famines. People started talking about it until after the collapse of the USSR. Nobody outside Asia paid particular attention to Japanese atrocities in China and Korea, the legal cases about "comfort women" and like happened decades later.
The reason why it takes time for atrocities to become known in is natural: Soon after a genocidal mass murder, the survivors often were not in a position to advertise their plight. It takes some time to emigrate out from the immediate aftereffects of the atrocity, then it takes time build stable life, it takes time get interviewed and/or get organized and/or become the person collecting evidence, writing memoirs, books and reports. Only after the memoirs and books have been printed people start reading them. It takes some time for the books and reports to became widely read and gain staying power. (Like today, also yesterday people forgot most of the news, unless they were personally affected or specifically paying attention. Especially WW2 had lot of atrocities, unreliably reported, difficult to distinguish from propaganda.) Consider Belgium's king Leopold's atrocities in Congo: they were a cause celebre for a brief moment in ~1900, and then were mostly forgotten for nearly a century. Congo never became that prominent place, they did not organize successfully to publish their victimization in the West. Same goes for the British atrocities in Africa. The atrocities in Congo were "found again" only in the 1990s after it had became popular and important in the West to talk about all atrocities and colonial atrocities in particular. Today, with widespread instant electronic communication and cultural milieu where comparing preferred outgroup to Nazis is a powerful political weapon, the handling of atoricites in the media as they happend is different than it was in the past.
Also, as an aside, you making a big show of Ctrl-Fin "holocaust", which is a very puzzling point for you to make: I don't understand what you are intending to achieve by making it. Rudimentary search into the existing "official" source as Wikipedia reveals that yes, use of the word "Holocaust" started getting traction in the 1950s and became common in the "late 1960s". This is well attested and well documented. Not finding any records of usage of a word with its modern meaning in works published in 1948 is not surprising, it is expected given the other available documentation. Like the question of "efficiency never seen before", the evolution of terminology and popular consciousness of "the Holocaust" is not direct evidence about to what Germans did or did not.
(1 if we accept your claim, which I am reluctant to do, given that you first argued that Eisenhower didn't discuss the Holocaust, then as another Mottezen provided quotes where Eisenhower does discuss the camps related to German atrocities, you proceed to dismiss it as "nothing". What other claims are "nothing" in your reading but not in other people's reading?)
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The claim of the holocaust is that the Germans acted in a systematic fashion to kill millions of non-combatants, primarily Jews, during WWII. It is certainly not the claim that this is the worst thing that any society has ever done. I believe the standard holocaust "narrative" completely, but I would consider the Great Leap Forward, Holodomor, Killing Fields, the soviet Great Purge, just about everything Japan did to China, the Great Terror of the French revolution, the War in the Vendee, and a great many other historical events equal in kind to the holocaust, with a few greater in degree.
And the testimony of Eisenhower, in his autobiographies and public speaking, and the testimony of the US Army investigations into the camps, and the testimony of thousands of survivors, all seems to point to the fact that Germany killed millions of non-combatants, mostly Jews, on purpose. Primarily through starvation or being shot, but they also definitely killed people in gas chambers as well.
They certainly do not portray the camps as workcamps for enemy aliens. Eisenhower portrays them as "horror camps" where Germans showed "brutality and ruthless disregard of every shred of decency" and whose residents experienced "conditions of indescribable horror". At no point does he blame the conditions in the camps or the starvation of the camp inmates as being the result of collapse, or a loss of life support function during the onslaught of war. Find me the quote where he refers to them as standard work camps, or puts the blame on a lack of supplies rather than the Nazi "bestiality".
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Some 40% of WWII dead were Chinese. Do Churchill, De Gaulle, and Eisenhower devote 40%. of their writing to Chinese war dead?
Then the answer is no, you haven't examined any of the evidence for the Holocaust one way or the other beyond memes.
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The term "Holocaust" didn't come into popular use until the late 1950s.
Here's a Churchill reference. Of course it doesn't use the term, but it's about the holocaust.
Churchill in this message was actually reusing some of the same words he had used in a message to Anthony Eden two days previously (in the context of learning about the deportation of Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz):
Ironically enough he torpedoes two denialist claims in this short message. No wonder they pretend it doesn't exist.
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“The same day [April 12, 1945] I saw my first horror camp. It was near the town of Gotha. I have never felt able to describe my emotional reactions when I first came face to face with indisputable evidence of Nazi brutality and ruthless disregard of every shred of decency. Up to that time I had known about it only generally or through secondary sources. I am certain, however that I have never at any other time experienced an equal sense of shock.
“I visited every nook and cranny of the camp because I felt it my duty to be in a position from then on to testify at first hand about these things in case there ever grew up at home the belief or assumption that `the stories of Nazi brutality were just propaganda.’ Some members of the visiting party were unable to through the ordeal. I not only did so but as soon as I returned to Patton’s headquarters that evening I sent communications to both Washington and London, urging the two governments to send instantly to Germany a random group of newspaper editors and representative groups from the national legislatures. I felt that the evidence should be immediately placed before the American and British publics in a fashion that would leave no room for cynical doubt.”
-- Dwight D. Eisenhower, Crusade in Europe: A Personal Account of World War II, pp. 488-489 (in the edition Google Books can search, anyway)
No, he didn't use the word "holocaust" or "final solution". But he sure mentioned it.
He didn't use "Holocaust" or "Final Solution" or describe gas chambers, and the camp he visited is acknowledged as a "normal" concentration camp by historians, which did not have a homicidal gas chamber. So the brutality he mentioned is simply the terrible conditions in the concentration camps as Germany was being bombed at all sides at the end of the war.
There is no mention of gas chambers or an extermination plan in any of those works. A passing reference to "Nazi brutality" at a concentration camp which nobody claims had gas chambers is the closest thing there is, and it's not even close.
If millions of people were exterminated within gas chambers disguised as shower rooms, this would without a doubt be the most unusual event to happen in WWII. It wouldn't escape mention in any of these memoirs unless they privately dismissed those claims as propaganda which would fall by the wayside like WWI propaganda about "corpse factories."
The word holocaust was not in use yet at the time he wrote that book.
While Eisenhower did not talk about it specifically in that book, he was aware of gas chambers and crematoria. In 1944 he received a report from Captain Yurka Galitzine on the Natzweiler concentration camp that specifically mentions mass executions (by firearm), experimental gas chambers, and crematoria.
Colonel William Quinn wrote a detailed report on Dachau that Eisenhower received in 1945 that described the gas chambers and crematoria in detail, with photographic evidence. The report also references a contemporaneous account, a diary of an internee who recorded his experiences.
The contemporaneous documented testimony and photographic evidence seems pretty overwhelming.
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Eisenhower didn’t capture any concentration camps with gas chambers, though.
It’s worth noting that the Auschwitz commander admitted to running a death camp before his execution, the Soviet didn’t make a particularly big deal out of it(after all, they did worse things), but they said it was a death camp, and the committee at Nuremberg said it was a death camp.
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