Holocaust denial (1967- ) is the belief that the Holocaust never took place, that Hitler never killed 5 to 6 million Jews. Whether millions of others died at his death camps is rarely addressed.
What deniers claim:
- Hitler never gave orders to wipe out the Jews.
- Jews were transported to labour camps and died of disease and lack of food due to supply lines cut by the Allied bombing.
- The gas chambers at the camps were only used to rid clothing and blankets of lice. The crematoria only burned the bodies of those already dead.
- Only 300,000 to 2 million Jews died in the war, none from genocide.
What scholars know:
- Hitler and other top leaders talked about wiping out the Jews.
- There were large orders of poison gas which arrived at the camps.
- There are eyewitness accounts, pictures, written orders, contractor notes, blueprints, reports, letters and diaries all pointing to the fact that Jews were being wiped out on purpose, men, women and children. Many were gassed. This comes not just from Jews but from Germans too, both military and civilian.
- By the end of the war 5.1 to 6.3 million Jews were missing.
The reasonable conclusion is that Hitler had up to six million Jews killed. This is what nearly all historical scholars who have studied the matter say. There are debates about how the Holocaust unfolded, but not about the fact of the Holocaust itself. The figure of 5 to 6 million is pretty solid too since it can be arrived at several ways.
The big hole in Holocaust denial is that it cannot account for the millions of missing Jews. Over half the Jews of Europe had disappeared in the space of four years. They did not appear later in Russia or America or Israel or anywhere else.
This is not to say that everything the general public believes about the Holocaust is true. There is no proof, for example, that 4 million were killed at Auschwitz – as far as we can tell only a million were. Nor has it ever been proved that Jews were made into soap. And Dachau, it turns out, was not a death camp.
Holocaust deniers use the same old tricks as scientific racists and genocidal governments:
- Leading experts are from the wrong fields: none are historical scholars. Not even David Irving or Mark Weber.
- Conspiracy theory: The universities and the press are against them because they are controlled by Jews.
- They reason backwards from conclusions to facts and not, like historical scholars, from facts to conclusions.
- Serious errors in reasoning: They often use the lack of facts to prove a negative.
- They blame bad luck: Jews died because the war cut off the camps from food supplies.
- They blame out-of-control forces: Some blame the high number of Jewish dead on Hitler’s commanders or the chaos of war, but never on Hitler himself.
- Moral equivalence: The Holocaust was no worse than the Allied bombings of Dresden and Hiroshima or the American prison camps for Japanese Americans.
See also:
“The big hole in Holocaust denial is that it cannot account for the millions of missing Jews. Over half the Jews of Europe had disappeared in the space of four years. They did not appear later in Russia or America or Israel or anywhere else.”
Well, if you are a holocaust denier this is easy to explain. Since Jews are all cunning and scheming, there is a plot that all Jews know about in which they pretend to be missing, when really they are alive and well. It’s all in order to induce guilt among gentiles, so they’ll be too guilty to notice that Jews are taking over the world.
So basically, being a Holocaust denier means that you believe that most if not all Jews are involved in pulling a gigantic scam on the rest of the world.
LikeLike
@abagond:
Actually the lampshades thing has been documented. They also collected tattooed skind. Pictures of these have been presented decades ago and since. If my mind does not play tricks this happened at Treblinka. Jews were not used for soap but their hair, teeth etc. were taken and used as material for industries.
While Dachau was not designated a death camp, neither was Auschwitz. Actually Birkenau was worse than Auschwitz proper. The estimate of dead at Auschwitz ranges from 2 to 6 million, two being the conservative.
A real death factory was place like Belcez where there was no forced labour or anything else. Rather small place it was designed just to kill mainly jews. In few months the place was operational, some 80 000 jews perished there. They were brought by train, forced to get naked and ran into a gas chamber, killed, cleaned out from the back while the next batch was waiting their turn to be eliminated.
We are very lucky that germans were so strickt and kept their books in order and documented everything, including the holocaust. They have the books on number of victims, their sexes, how many died and when, photographs of the victims etc.
Those who deny the holocaust are the same guys who deny slavery or the genocide of the native americans. Same logic, same arguments. Alas, they were all true events.
LikeLike
@ Sam:
Yes, the Germans kept very good records. Many of the records were lost during the war, of course, but what we have is more than damning. As genocides go, this one is probably the hardest to deny.
I looked up the lampshade thing and could find no proof of it. If you have an online reference, I would be interested to see it.
LikeLike
@abagond:
http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Holocaust/skin.html
There are several photos in the net too, just google “lamp shade made human skin” and choose photos.
This has been denied from the get go, but forensic investigation proved that they are indeed made out of human skin. By whom, that is another question, but knowing what we know, I think the culprits are the same guys who ran the genocide.
LikeLike
… and all of this under “freedom of speech”.
I think genocide deniers wouldn’t hesitate a second to, at least, condone or even participate in a new one.
LikeLike
It is true that much of what the general public believes about the soap and lampshades made from humans is myth, there is a grain of truth to both.
There were instances of Nazi scientists experimenting with making soap from human fat, and as the bodies of those recently murdered in the camps was conveniently available, this was what was used: however there is no evidence of manufacture of human soap on an industrial scale.
There were also a few instances of lampshades made from human skin documented, but these were, again, not done on an industrial scale, these were instances of a sociopathic individual with time on his hands.
Essentially: the government policy of genocide gave license to the participants to commit their own individual acts of inhumanity above and beyond the call of duty.
LikeLike
I believe the B!tch of Buchenwald was the one to make lampshades out of human skin. Her husband was in charge of one of the camps. She also made a habit of walking around naked among the prisoners, and if any man glanced her way during this time, they were immediately shot. She also engaged in other, more sadistic forms of sado-masochism with the prisoners — both male and female, even children! — but these are from survivor testimonies and harder to substantiate.
My thrice great-grandfather was held at Dachau for a time until being moved to Auschwitz where he was eventually gassed along with hundreds of others. His shoes are on display at the Holocaust museum in Washington DC. Look up Samuel Cohen. (Might be difficult, because there are a lot of them. But I think I wrote his shoe’s number down somewhere…)
Perhaps the most difficult thing for us is that many advances of science came at the expense of tests done on Holocaust victims. Experiments with hypothermia, syphilis, genetic inheritance, twin-studies, human organ transplant, and other advances all came through horrific experiments done at places like Bergen-Belsen, Dachau, and other camps. Is it morally right to utilize the findings from that research despite the ways in which they were carried out? Can we separate the good of that knowledge from the evil done to get it? Such questions are important, and often overlooked among the massive tragic history of the Shoah.
Interestingly, Holocaust denial isn’t only abut outrightly saying, “it never happened.” It also involves downplaying the casualties, the atrocities, the numbers, the camps purposes, and other strange things. But even more disturbingly, it often turns into a big “get over it” type of mentality. As if genocide is something you can just “get over” in the space of a couple generations. Slavery in America happened over a hundred years ago and the effects are still being felt today.
But alas, people are gonna be crazy and hateful, often no matter what we say or do. It then becomes about acknowledging that hatred, understand why it’s misplaced and wrong, and then dismissing it altogether to move on to more productive things.
LikeLike
***Holocaust deniers use the same old tricks as scientific racists ***
Heh, I know you want to dismiss HBD but this is pretty lame.
LikeLike
@ Schwartz
So was your attempt to dismiss the truth behind his words…
LikeLike
@ Franklin,
The first claim doesn’t stand up, let alone the remaining ones.
***Leading experts are from the wrong fields: ***
Not true of HBD (human biodiversity). You have geneticists (Bruce Lahn, James Crow, James Watson, Francis Crick), behavioural geneticists (David C Rowe, Arthur Jensen was a founding member of the BGA), anthropologists (Henry Harpending, Ralph Holloway, Vince Sarich), psychologists (Richard Herrnstein, Richard Lynn, Linda Gottfredson).
LikeLike
@Schwartz,
Actually it makes perfect sense. Both groups of people use poor evidence catered around their viewpoints in order to excuse their racism.
LikeLike
Bruce Lahn isn’t a preeminent scientist, though in his publications he celebrates diversity, rather than condemns it. Definitely not a race-realist.
James Crow’s greatest contribution has been as a teacher, not as a geneticist.
James Watson doesn’t believe in HBD at all. In fact, he expressed shock and regret at his own words regarding sub-Saharan African intelligence.
Francis Crick was a eugenicist, and also stole research from female scientists.
David Rowe is a psychologist who studies genetics, but isn’t actually trained in the field.
Arthur Jensen is also a psychologist, not a geneticist, biologist or forensic anthropologist.
Henry Harpending is a Jewish conspiracy nut who hasn’t published anything of worth in the field except 10k year explosion, which was discredited. (However, he still makes the case for genetics and environment, neither overwhelmingly. So again, not an HBDer.)
Ralph Holloway is also not an HBDer. He argues (like most people) that brain size — specifically in The Hobbit — is not an overwhelming factor in intelligence. He argues for brain structure.
Vince Sarich recently had to correct himself in The Times because he made a lot of unsubstantiated claims about women, homosexuals, and People of Color. Regarding intelligence he said that despite the correlation “there is not a lot of evidence to support that theory because there isn’t a lot of research done on the subject.”
As for Herinstein, Lynn and Gottfredson, they are psychologist. Not biologists or geneticists or forensic anthropologists.
So… yeah. Abagond is spot on.
And if you want to play “the name game”, I’d be more than happy to copy+paste my ever growing list.
LikeLike
At this point, it’s old news.
http://community.seattletimes.nwsource.com/archive/?date=20010211&slug=race11m
LikeLike
But oft repeated.
http://www.iol.co.za/scitech/technology/scientists-prove-that-race-does-not-exist-1.98270
LikeLike
David Irving has regrettably gone off the deep end, but he is a superb historian in the sense that no one anywhere knows Third Reich records better. It’s his interpretation of them is questionable, but the cold, hard facts he cites are rarely incorrect.
LikeLike
@ Zek: Thanks.
@ Schwartz: This post is not about HBD. I am giving that stuff a rest for a while, like till some time next month after I have read quite a bit of Cavalli-Sforza.
LikeLike
My grand-grandfather died in Dachau – how can anyone say it was not a death camp???!!! He was tortured to death… I think it’s just another lie about what happened during the WWII. My grand-grandfather wasn’t even a Jew, he was Polish (Roman-Catholic). Among the people who died in Dachau were also Poles (mainly well-educated and very intelligent) but mainly Jews. Many were tortured to death!!! It’s a shame when someone denies the Holocaust.
LikeLike
@ Mencken:
I agree. Irving probably knows more about the Third Reich than almost anyone else alive in the English-speaking world. But he has no historical training and it shows. He is selective in his facts and he twists them. He is practising not history but pseudohistory. Also he is a writer and not a scholar: his audience is not made up of scholars but, these days, mostly neo-Nazis and anti-Semites.
LikeLike
@ Grażyna:
There were different kinds of camps:
Some were prison camps and labour camps. They were just like what the Holocaust deniers say all the camps were like: there were shootings and executions, sure, but most who died did so because the conditions there were so terrible. Dachau was one of these, as were most of the other camps in Germany. Dachau was only a third Jewish and less than 10% of its prisoners died, mostly from disease, lack of food and suicide.
The death camps, on the other hand, were built to carry out a genocide, to kill people by the thousands on purpose. They had specially built gas chambers. Those were further east in Poland, places like Auschwitz and Treblinka. Due to German law, most Jews were killed outside of Germany.
That at least is my understanding of it.
LikeLike
But there were gas chambers in Dachau:
http://www.holocaust-history.org/dachau-gas-chambers/
“It is quite sufficient, for the moment, to demonstrate that the Nazis intended to use a homicidal gas chamber in Dachau, and that they designed, built and equipped such a chamber in the Dachau Concentration Camp.”
Pictures of Dachau gas chamber interior:
http://www.scrapbookpages.com/dachauscrapbook/gaschamber/interior00.html
My point is, I don’t really see any difference between “prison camps”/”labour camps” and “death camps”. No matter how people died there (gassed, starved to death, shot, beaten up), they are all DEATH concentration camps to me because they were all designed to KILL INNOCENT people! So what are the people now going to “prove”? That Dachau was just a “work place” or a prison for criminals? Please!!! DACHAU WAS A DEATH CAMP! Just like any other concentration camp!!! I see no difference, really!
LikeLike
Right, but if there is “no difference” between Dachau and the other camps, then Holocaust deniers can hold up Dachau as an example of what most camps were like: a place where fewer than 10% of the prisoners died, mostly from a typhus epidemic, a place where only a third were Jewish.
You no longer have a genocide, Hitler’s Final Solution, just an Extremely Unfortunate Chain of Events As Is Common in War, one where maybe 600,000 died across all the camps – which is just what the deniers claim.
So, yes, the difference matters.
LikeLike
There were gas chambers at Dachau: mostly used for defumigation of clothing. There was at least one that was designed for homocide but there’s little evidence that it was used more than occasionally and appears mostly to have been used for experiments in the effectiveness of gas weapons.
The basic point is that the Germans had camps that while all camps were ultimately lethal in different degrees, there were real distinctions between those specifically designed for mass murder, those specifically designed for exploiting slave labor, and those specifically designed as prisons for those whose only crimes were that of religion, politics, or sexual orientation– and the survival rate of inmates at these specific camps varied accordingly.
Dachau has a certain place in the American imagination, because it was the first such camp that Americans liberated, and so it symbolizes to Americans all the evils of Naziism, however, it was not the most murderous site that the Nazis operated.
LikeLike
Right, Dachau was bad, but some of the other camps were flat-out genocidal and up to 50 times worse in terms of the number of deaths.
LikeLike
Here is the real deal, a death factory:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Be%C5%82%C5%BCec_extermination_camp
@mencken: You kid yourself, Irving has been troughly discredited many times over, actually he looked like a fool he is in those few open debates he did take a part back in 80’s. Irving is bonafidé holocaust denier.
LikeLike
***@ Schwartz: This post is not about HBD. I am giving that stuff a rest for a while, like till some time next month after I have read quite a bit of Cavalli-Sforza.***
Ok, fair enough.
@ Zek, you really do talk some nonsense sometimes!
LikeLike
Schwartz,
“It will do you no harm to find yourself ridiculous. Resign yourself to be the fool you are.” — The Cocktail Party, by T.S. Eliot
LikeLike
11 million died in the camps and only 6 million died in the camps as jew who had family who died in the camps remember “evil and power” are hungry goods who will never be satisfied — those who doubt look at how many germans died
LikeLike
very sad , i am a 9 year old girl
LikeLike
The total number of people kiled by the Nazis was closer to 14 million, not 6 million. The Nazis had it in for Jews but they also had it in for Roma (commonly miscalled “Gypsies”), non-Jewish Poles, Serbs, Russians,
homosexuals, and Catholic priests. If anything this makes them even more
evil than if they had killed only Jews. Hitler was an all-around racist bigot,
and an example of what a person with those views can do if they get into a
position of power. He was as evil as they come. There are rumors that
Hitler and some of the people around him were involved in Satanism and
witchcraft, e.g. Himmler. If there isn’t a Hell for such people after they die,
then there should be.
LikeLike
[…] Holocaust denial […]
LikeLike
Fred Leuchter disproved the gas chambers.
LikeLike