The floor is open..........

Let's start with a statement of fact.

Over six million innocent people were murdered by the Nazi Party before Berlin was captured in 1945.

Jews, leftists, intellectuals, gay men, Gypsies, Poles and the developmentally disabled were herded to forced labor camps and worked to death or murdered.

As I say, this is an indisputable fact and the key to understanding the nationalist race ideology of the Party, which aggressively initiated the second world war.

make that 12million shanet, 6 million of them being jewish.
john

WARNING to anyone who would be tempted to claim that the holocaust is a myth: You could end up in jail!

Denis Morissette,Feb 2 2005, 12:34 AM
WARNING to anyone who would be tempted to claim that the holocaust is a myth: You could end up in jail!

Let me share my experience. In a recent trip to Germany we spent a day at Dachau. I had wanted to go there to pay my respects, especially after watching the Munich massacre of the Israeli athletes in 1972 (Dachau was visible in the distance from the Olympic stadium). I was with a group; our tour guide (Austrian) and bus driver (Swedish) dropped us off and returned later in the day to pick us up. I asked why they had not come in. "I never go into places like that," the guide said. "It is all the same, you Americans did the same things, but they don't make you open up camps for people to parade around in."

While there, I found myself walking around bewildered, until I realized that all the original buildings had been torn down and new ones built in the "same style". The wooden shoes and uniforms on display were new. It was very clean. It seemed entirely sanitized. I became so distressed, I finally went inside to the main building and found myself watching the movies that play continually. It was there that I found my orientation, for they showed the Allied soldiers forcing the citizens of Dachau (the camp is on the main road into town, quite visible) to walk through the camp after its liberation; the well-dressed men and women were fainting and becoming ill into their ironed hankerchiefs. There was a little justice, after all.

Pamela

Holocaust denial is unpleasant and disreputable academically, and actually illegal in some countries. If, however, it isn't illegal in your own country, which, in the case of Mr Morissette, I assume to the the USA, then I would think it most unlikely that you would be arrested and extradited! Or is there yet another "conspiracy" involved here about which I know nothing? Like the Corsican, Greek, Italian, FBI, Cuban, CIA, Yale, etc conspiracies to kill Kennedy...

The Holocaust is one of the most comprehensively documented events in history. It is therefore difficult to believe that any sane individual can believe it did not happened. Therefore, most people, including myself, assume that Holocaust deniers are racists. However, does that mean that the expression of this theory is always racist. Is it healthy for a government to stop citizens from expressing holocaust denial beliefs?

As a historian who is only too aware of how governments have used censorship in the past to control the minds of its citizens, I rarely support the idea of censorship. However, I do believe that anything that encourages hatred of a particular race does need to be censored. However, problems arise from this position. For example, some people have claimed that criticism of the foreign policies of Israel is racist. Similar things have been said about criticisms of Muslim governments. Christians have argued recently in the UK that the authorities are quick to ban things that give offence to the Muslim community but are unwilling to ban things such as the Jerry Springer Musical that offend Christians.

I'm actually from Canada. Here you may be criminally prosecuted for denying the holocaust.

Holocaust denial quite rightly is a criminal offence in many countries and would of course break our Forum Guidelines.

How many people were killed in the Auswitch concentration camp, and for how many years was the camp operational? How many people killed a day does it make? I think the Chief of the camp said that they killed 4 million people.

Denial is criminal in Canada, but is "questionning" the holocaust as well?

I'm a bit worried that we may be going down a trail we shouldn't. Clearly, the Holocaust is a major historical event and, as such, should be researched and even debated. I'm not sure I even agree with Andy that it is right to make Holocaust denial illegal. However, it already seems that some of the posts on this come from people with axes to grind, and I'd hate to see the forum overwhelmed by people intent on propagating their own rather peculiar versions of "history". Again, even at this early stage, some of the posts appear to be somewhat provocative...

Again, I understand the views of the moderators regarding censorship, but I do think that if there is going to be a "holocaust debate" on here, it will have to be scrupulously monitored...

I thought you might be interested in this email I have just received from Salvador Astucia. Hopefully, you will now understand how we were trying to handle a difficult situation.

John Simkin: Your fellow propagandist, Andy Walker, has essentially revoked my posting privileges, although he claims he's merely monitoring my posts. The bottom line is my messages are not being posted on the message board. So in effect, it equivalent to having one's privileges revoked. Frankly, it was a gutless move. He's giving people the false impression that I left voluntarily, so he can claim he runs an open forum. Even for an obvious propaganda operation, your forum is really bad. Not just flawed. It's very bad. It's worse than the Usenet. And your moderating abilities? The worst. Poor. Very poor. Perhaps you should consider retirement. Seriously.

Salvador Astucia

Denis, what do you mean by "questioning the holocaust"? What is there to be questioned? What are the questions?

Referring to your previous posting: Does it really matter how many people were murdered every day in Auschwitz? The problem of the holocaust is not one of numbers but of the political idea and plan behind it: the idea of a master race who has every right of the world to destroy the races which this master race and its ideologists defined as being inferior. Couple this ideology with the proverbial German efficiency and you have the industrialized mass murder of innocent people which went on in Auschwitz. Every single person who died in the German concentration camps -be it Jews, Jehovas Witnesses, Sinti, homosexuals, those who opposed the system- is one too many. Not only people were killed the holocaust also exterminated a language (Yiddish)and a culture which had been an integral part of European culture and academic life for centuries.

For me as a German there are many questions relating to the holocaust: how could it happen in a country which can be proud of its poets and philosophers and its contribution to the ideas of the Enlightenment and liberalism and socialism; why did people actively or passively support this system knowing full well what was going on in Germany and what happened to the Jews and the other groups mentioned above; how could those who had killed hundreds and thousands of people on a daily basis not feel any guilt; can such a thing happen again. These are the questions I have concerning Nazism and Auschwitz.

Thank you Ulrike for raising pertinent, important and intelligent questions of the Holocaust.
This is a welcome change in this otherwise thoroughly depressing thread.

Full details of this Canadian law is given in this thread:

http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index.php?showtopic=3097

There are of course several different interpretations of what went on in Nazi Germany. Some people place a great deal of emphasis on the anti-Semitic nature of Nazism. In this case numbers actually matter. The number of Jews who died as a result of the government’s policies is an indication of its barbarity. People who stress this aspect of Nazism are especially hostile to those Nazis today who claim that the Holocaust did not take place. This has resulted in the Canadian law where people can be imprisoned for being Holocaust deniers. It is also the reason why some have argued that Holocaust deniers should not be members of this forum.

Other interpretations of Nazi Germany have placed emphasis on the political aspects of this political philosophy. They will highlight the fact that the first people to be sent to the concentration camps were Hitler’s left-wing political opponents. They will also place emphasis on the behaviour of the German Army in the Soviet Union. Numbers are also important to these people. They will claim that millions of “communists” were killed during this period of history.

These different interpretations can result in different lessons being learnt from this period of history. Those who place the emphasis on the religious aspects of Nazism are likely to be in favour of denying people the freedom to be Holocaust deniers.

However, others believe we should concentrate on the political aspects of Nazism. These people will argue that the main thing we should learn is that people should have the freedom to hold political opinions that are different from that of the government.

My own political views are diametrically opposite to those of the Nazis (past and present). However, I am totally against the idea that people should be imprisoned for holding these repulsive views.

Recently a teacher in the UK was sacked because he was a member of the National Front (a neo-Nazi political party in the UK). No evidence was provided to show that these political views had been expressed in the classroom. It was just enough to show that he was a party member. Few people were willing to defend the rights of this man to hold political views that were different from that of the government.

It is a very unpopular to defend the human rights of Nazis. Emotionally, I have difficulty doing this. However, if we are really living in a free and open democracy, I do believe that we have a duty to defend the rights of those who hold political opinions different to own own.

In many ways Nazis are in a different category from other political groups. They have a history of carrying out appalling crimes. However, conservatives and liberals did appalling things in the 19th century. Communists did terrible things in Eastern Europe in the 20th century. Are all groups to be continually punished for crimes their predecessors have committed?

As I have said I am in totally agreement with the idea of people being punished for expressing and encouraging racial or religious hatred (although I do not believe someone criticising the policies of the Israeli government is guilty of anti-Semitism). However, I do not believe people should be punished for holding deviant political opinions. After all, Jesus Christ was executed because of his deviant political views, as well as his deviant religious opinions.

Although I think it is a dangerous and at the same time disgusting situation that once again Neo-Nazis are Members of a German Landtag I also think that in a democracy even those must be granted the essential Human Rights and that the problem cannot be solved by censoring or making these parties illegal (which is possible in Germany).

But I do support the German law that punishes holocaust denial, even though I also know that there is a Neo-Nazi underground where these ideas are spread and published mainly via the Internet.

I think we owe this law to the victims - those who died and those who have survived. I personally see every denial of the holocaust as an attempt to minimize and even to ridicule the suffering of the victims, their families and offspring. Denying the holocaust once again infringes upon their human dignity and thus violates the first article of our constitution which states:"(1) Human dignity is inviolable. To respect and protect it is the duty of all state authority."

There is a book you might like to have a look at sometime:

"HITLER'S SCIENTISTS - Science, War, and the Devil's Pact" by John Cornwell.

It discusses how different people dealt with the rise of the Nazis. Some embraced it, some used it, some left their country, some ignored it, some tried to fight it, and some felt that despite hating the Nazis they had to support their country.

It talks about the various ethics in science, and whether we have changed at all today.

Highly recommended.

It's a strange conundrum, isn't it?

Our democratic ideals of freedom and liberty allow people to use those very ideals to destroy it, yet if we suppress those same people we violate our own ideals.

The methods used by the Nazis to achieve the killings were masterful. They used hatred (these people are subhuman and should be destroyed), pride (the need for German racial purity), deception (these people are being relocated) and even humanity itself (to let these people continue to live is inhumane; to kill them is merciful).

It's frightening to think that they nearly succeeded in conquest, and even more frightening to think of what they did as they were being defeated.

The number of people killed each day is one of the most basic questions you can ask. If you come, say to a number of 2000 people each day. Is it possible to kill that many people? I don't know. If it's not, then who is behing that lie? If I tell you than I can run 200 miles a day, you have to options: To idiotly believe it, or to wonder if it is possible. Your choice.

One Member says, “It’s a strange conundrum, isn’t it?

Another opinion is that Different groups identified with different ideologies may be interested in the actual numbers in order to announce their martyrs.

The next adds in with a feeling that it would be cruel joke with the victims if the Holocaust Denials will go unpunished.

One says that Human rights could be allowed to Nazis but their crimes deny them that right.

The governments have declared the denial a crime.

A contender emphasizes that democratic principles favour a virtue of freedom.

All are fine.

Dear Members, but the question by Denis is a normal question.

Even if we bind our intellectual endeavours and a historian’s scientific temper (his subject is a mistress of the powers which matters) by some ideological limits, then the pure, simple and 21st scientific temper demands from us to consider for once, at least for once to ponder on this aspect that how many days will it take to kill such a number of people. It may be depressing and revolting to do that but you can not deny the validity of the question. You have to sometime face unpalatable questions if your field demands.

The question is that if 4 million (4,000,000) people were killed in a camp before 1945, then how many people were killed in one day or in how many days they were killed?

Kindly consider that historians are scientists. They are just like detectives. They doubt their own findings and always remain open to possibility of re-examination and evaluation of their inferences. They doubt their source of information and continue to question the fact which they are able to discern.

Further, a good historian does not belong to a nation. He belongs to whole of humanity. He is interested in the work of whole humanity; Gandhi and Hitler both. In doing so, he performs his duty to humanity. The question here should not be denied an evaluation by the scientific temper of the FORUM even if there is ploy behind this whole query.

I am from India. India was strongly against the fascist forces. Only one of our leader, Netaji Subash Chander Bose was on the side of Hitler. But, that has to be understood under different topic of history. I assure you, that I have no axe to grind; nothing to achieve from it. But, as a student of history, I think, I must try to consider this question.

The floor is open…..

Sumir does raise a good point. We DO have to be take an impartial, unbiased look at history and verify what what we have recorded - if possible.

You have to be able to challenge certain things, and make them verifiable.

I've had this in the APOLLO hoax threads. People can ask "Can you explain this?" I then try to show how and why something is correct or verifiable.

The difficulties appear when people:

1. Make an questionable statement rather seek facts; and

2. Will not accept a valid arguement for any reasonable reason.

If someone asks "Is it really possible that so many were killed?", then that is a valid question which should be answered.

If someone says "The Holocoust was a lie created by Zionist supporters!" then this is simply an unsupported statement which has discriminatory overtones.

Truth should be able to supported by fact or reproducable observation, otherwise it simply becomes a theory.

Even if the historian sticks to the facts available, you still have the problem how these facts are interpreted. I remember one of my university lecturers claiming that E. H. Carr once said that a historian is very much like an angler. Fish are like historical facts, the fish you catch depends on the bait you use and the place on the river where you decide to stand.

As D. H. Lawrence once said, every philosopher ends at his fingertips. E. H. Carr was in fact describing his own approach to history. One of the problems of all historical research is that the historian starts with a theory of what happened. This theory is greatly influenced by the historian’s ideology. This of course restricts the facts that the historian discovers.

There is another factor in this. Certain figures have the power to destroy documentary evidence. They also have the power to run disinformation campaigns. This is especially a problem when dealing with issues like the JFK assassination or Watergate. It will definitely be a problem when historians tackle events like the Iraq War.

The same is true when dealing with the Holocaust. There is no doubt that people in the Western world felt a great deal of guilt about what happened to the Jews in Nazi Germany. To a certain extent this helps to explain why the West supported the formation of Israel. The Arabs have therefore been punished for the guilt suffered by the West.

Some historians have pointed out that it was not Hitler’s original intention to kill the Jews. In the 1930s he made several speeches calling for Western countries to take Germany’s Jews. Aware of the anti-Semitism that existed in their own countries, most countries refused to take them in (Sweden is one of the few countries that can take any credit from this episode). This is of course a relevant issue in today’s dilemma about taking asylum seekers. In the 1930s the UK government claimed that some of these German refugees were really Nazi spies. Now they are described as “possible Muslim terrorists”.

Some Jewish historians have written about anti-Semitism in the UK government during the Second World War. Information about the Holocaust reached the UK soon after it started. The UK government refused to believe it. In fact they refused pleas to bomb the railway tracks leading to the extermination camps. Some of the documents have survived from the debate that went on at the time. It seems that senior members of the RAF were unwilling to risk the lives of their pilots to bomb the transport routes to the extermination camps. Was this an example of anti-Semitism? Or was it because their interpretation of the evidence was faulty?

This is true, but most of the extermination camps were in the east, far closer to Soviet airbases than to American and British bases in Southern England. Would it not be "even-handed" to mention that Stalin hardly seems to have been busting a nut to help out either?

I think the more preoccupying feature of this "debate" is the attitude inherent in the "2000-a-day" argument. The implication of the argument is that if you can't trust the jewish-controlled media to tell the truth about the exact number of jews killed in one camp, then it throws doubt on the whole event of the Holocaust.

Another thing that worries me is that some of the people making these arguments appear to have anti-semitic views -- like the suggestion that Canada is controlled by some sort of hidden jewish cabal -- while others seem to have less than totally credible academic credentials -- like the chap who claims on his website to be in touch with the spirit of John Lennon in the afterlife (you'll be pleased to hear that he's doing well in the Great Beyond and has recently divorced Yoko and remarried...) which can only bring into question the more respectable contributions on the forum...

I agree. I did not mention Stalin in case people thought I was comparing him with Winston Churchill. Both Stalin and Churchill were both known to hold anti-Semitic views. However, that was not unusual in the ruling classes in the UK and the Soviet Union. You can add the United States to that list. McCarthyism was mainly directed at the Jews who held left-wing views.

[quote=Sumir Sharma,Feb 7 2005, 06:31 PM]
The floor is open…..

Fair enough. It would seem that if we can list the camps that had facilities for extermination, then determine how many could have been killed in a day, we would have a basis for analysis.

There may be another point -- namely, that those who died in the camps because of illness, malnourishment, overwork etc, are also vicims of the 'final solution'.

Auschwitz-Birkenau
Treblinka
Bergen-Belsen
Sobibor
Belzec
Madjanek

Do you consider this quote accurate?
That comes down to 80+ per hour, per chamber, or app. 3M/year.

QUOTE ON

The largest extermination camp was Auschwitz-Birkenau, which by spring 1943 had four gas chambers (using Zyklon B gas) in operation. At the height of the deportations, up to 8,000 Jews were gassed each day at Auschwitz-Birkenau in Poland. Over a million Jews and tens of thousands of Roma, Poles, and Soviet prisoners of war were gassed there by November 1944.

QUOTE OFF

http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/article.php?lang=...duleId=10005145

Pamela

[quote=Pamela McElwain-Brown,Feb 9 2005, 03:21 AM]
[quote=Sumir Sharma,Feb 7 2005, 06:31 PM]
The floor is open…..

Fair enough. It would seem that if we can list the camps that had facilities for extermination, then determine how many could have been killed in a day, we would have a basis for analysis.

There may be another point -- namely, that those who died in the camps because of illness, malnourishment, overwork etc, are also vicims of the 'final solution'.

Auschwitz-Birkenau
Treblinka
Bergen-Belsen
Sobibor
Belzec
Madjanek

Do you consider this quote accurate?
That comes down to 80+ per hour, per chamber, or app. 3M/year.

QUOTE ON

The largest extermination camp was Auschwitz-Birkenau, which by spring 1943 had four gas chambers (using Zyklon B gas) in operation. At the height of the deportations, up to 8,000 Jews were gassed each day at Auschwitz-Birkenau in Poland. Over a million Jews and tens of thousands of Roma, Poles, and Soviet prisoners of war were gassed there by November 1944.

QUOTE OFF

http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/article.php?lang=...duleId=10005145

Pamela

[/quote]

Thanks for those numbers. I don't think the Germans were killing people around the clock. That would make the number of people killed an hour much higher. How many people were there in average at the Auswitch camp, and how many Germans were killing people? Consider the time it takes to remove the bodies out of the gas chambers and the time to dig holes to put the bodies.

This gets creepier and creepier... Does it really make any difference whether 6,000,000 or 5,500,000 were killed? Do we really need to delve into the number of minutes it takes to remove a pile of ashes from a crematorium, or the number of hours worked by Nazi murderers? Perhaps we need to take into account the weather conditions because it would have taken longer to dig mass graves if the ground was frozen, and the absentee rate of Nazi camp guards would have been higher it if were raining...

I hate to join in the general atmosphere of paranoia, but it does seem to me that the Deniers tactics seem to involve a dual strategy of belittling the issue by urging us to examine minute details about which exact information will probably have been lost (or destroyed by the International Jewish Conspiracy) in the intervening 60 years and which in any case are only marginally relevant. At the same time, one regularly runs into completely untrue statements proclaimed as fact, like the recent claim that anyone outside to the good ole USA who denied the Holocaust would immediately be incarcerated...

I'm still worried about the effect hosting the sort of comments we've been getting in this "discussion" will have on the Forum as a whole...

I agree. It makes no difference to the enormity of the crime committed against the human race.

What interests me is how different countries have used the Holocaust to support their own political agenda. For example, the Soviet Union have emphasised the numbers in an attempt to detract from the crimes committed by Stalin in the 1930s. It was also used to justify the occupation of countries in Eastern Europe (needed a “buffer zone from the fascists in the West”)

In countries like the UK and the US great stress is placed on the Holocaust for political reasons. The UK and the US give the idea that it was because of its actions that the system was brought to an end. (It is rarely mentioned that it was the Red Army that did most of this “liberation” of the concentration camps.) The emphasis on the Holocaust is to suggest that this is the reason why the war was fought. In reality, both countries had to be dragged screaming into the war. The protection of the Jewish race was the last thing on their minds. In fact, their policies in the 1930s was one of the main reasons why it took place.

Historians and politicians in Israel have used the Holocaust to defend their outrageous policies in the Middle East. Arabs are presented as trying to finish off Hitler’s work. The occupation of other country’s land is justified as being an attempt to stop their people from being exterminated.

Mike, I am just trying to figure out if it is possible to have a Holocaust in the Auswitch camp alone. It looks like you don't want me to do that. Why?

I don't understand the point you're trying to make. Who even suggested that the Holocaust only happened there? There were, as you know, many, many camps... Or did none of them exist? Just a figment of the collective imagination? Or a creation of the a shadowy "International Jewish Conspiracy"? Is that the same Jewish conspiracy which controls Canada, by any chance?

Mike, it is said that 4 million of people were killed in Auswitch ONLY. 4 million IS a holocaust, so l did mean that the Holocaust happened only at Auswitch. Pamela provided a quote of 8,000 people gassed a day. If you consider that they did not do any gassing between 10M and and 5AM, we come up with a number of maybe 10,000? You think it is possible?

I would be interested in getting more data like the number of trains that arrived daily in Auswitch, the number of people by train, the number of German employees at the camp, the time to force people in the gas chamber, the time to gas them, the time to get them out of that chamber, the time to dig the holes to put the bodies in, etc. And where do you take the space to burry 10,000 a day!

As I have pointed out several times, people who deny the Holocaust need medical help. Therefore, I believe a hospital rather than a prison is the best place for the.

However, I think present day Holocaust deniers are not really a problem. They should be seen for what they are. The people who need attacking are those who denied the Holocaust at the time it took place. These were the people who were partly responsible for the large number of people who died. I am thinking about people like Winston Churchill who refused to give the orders to bomb the transport links to the extermination camps, although he was not reluctant to order the bombing of Dresden and other civilian centres (the 60th anniversary of this war crime is coming up, I wonder how much publicity that will get in the UK media).

I am also thinking of people like Pope Pius XII who refused the request of President Franklin D. Roosevelt in September 1942 to denounce the Nazi persecution of the Jews in Europe. The nearest he came to public condemnation of the Holocaust was in his Christmas message of 1942 when he said: "Humanity owes this vow to those hundreds of thousands who, without any fault of their own, sometimes only by reason of their nationality or race, are marked down for death or gradual extinction." However, he resisted mentioning the Jews by name.

Pius XII was also criticised for his failure to act in Croatia during the Second World War. Croatia, a Catholic state, was responsible for the killing of 487,000 Orthodox Serbs, 27,000 Gypsies and around 30,000 Jews between 1941 and 1945.

Of course Pius XII was infallible and so God must have been in agreement with his silence on the Holocaust.

So much for Christianity. The established church has never been able to give a moral lead in matters of morality. It defended slavery and the slave trade because they could not find any evidence of Jesus Christ criticising it while he was alive. Maybe that was the reason why the Pope never criticised the treatment of Jews during the Second World War. Jesus failed to criticise such behaviour in any of his sermons.

I am very sorry, but the way this debate is going makes me sick and it is a humiliation for the victims and their families.
There is plenty of evidence for the Nazi programme to exterminate the Jews in Europe and Hitler even started talks with Arabs in Palestine to continue the killing once the war was won (which -thank God - did not happen). There is a countless number of books which answer all the questions like the one above and they do so in a scientific manner (Goldhagen: Hitler's willing Executioners; the confession of Hoess the commander of Auschwitz, ...) Fortunately there are survivors still who can tell their stories. There are the films either made by the Nazis themselves to demonstrate to the world how "marvellous" German energy combined with the latest machinery and chemical products was, films made by those army units who liberated the camps or the long and detailed documentary made by Claud Lanzman (Shoah) interviewing victims and those who lived near the railway lines and camps in Poland and saw what was going on.

The gas chambers were working around the clock, the trains were coming in day in and day out and there was no need to dig holes for bodies, beacuse the bodies were burnt and the ashes scattered on the fields surrounding the camp. Germans were only standing guard and filling the cyclone B into the chambers while the main job was done by prisoners who were still strong enough to remove the bodies from the gas chambers; most of those who had to do that were gassed after some time.
Finally, I only can repeat my very personal credo and conviction: One person killed in the name of racism of the worst kind possible (and that is the Nazi theory of the different races and everything it entailed) is one person too many.
A P.S. for Denis: You will not be able to meet someone who lives or has lived in Auschwitz if you cannot even spell its name properly.

People involved in this debate might be interested in this extract from Francis Beckett's book on his father John Beckett, a Holocaust denier and an imprisoned fascist during the Second World War.

http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index.php?showtopic=3170

Denis said:
Thanks for those numbers. I don't think the Germans were killing people around the clock. That would make the number of people killed an hour much higher. How many people were there in average at the Auswitch camp, and how many Germans were killing people? Consider the time it takes to remove the bodies out of the gas chambers and the time to dig holes to put the bodies.

Maybe not; that was a possibility. I believe the bodies were then cremated; that's what the ovens/furnaces were for. 'Healthy' inmates of the camp were used to do that.

Pamela

Ulrike, I find myself in agreement with all you said and you certainly put it better than I could have myself. Please ignore Mr Morissette's jibes. It is difficult to take seriously the "research" of someone who can't even spell the name of Auschwitz correctly!

And his claim that there are no holocaust deniers contributing to the forum can hardly be reconciled with his own contributions or with Mr Jeffries, who recently said, "I am finding it harder and harder to not "deny" the holocaust."

[QUOTE]Pius XII was also criticised for his failure to act in Croatia during the Second World War. Croatia, a Catholic state, was responsible for the killing of 487,000 Orthodox Serbs, 27,000 Gypsies and around 30,000 Jews between 1941 and 1945.

Of course Pius XII was infallible and so God must have been in agreement with his silence on the Holocaust.

So much for Christianity. The established church has never been able to give a moral lead in matters of morality. It defended slavery and the slave trade because they could not find any evidence of Jesus Christ criticising it while he was alive. Maybe that was the reason why the Pope never criticised the treatment of Jews during the Second World War. Jesus failed to criticise such behaviour in any of his sermons.

And, let us not forget the Catholic Church's sordid history of the Inquisition in Spain, where the Jews were forced to convert to Catholicism, or burn at the stake for non-compliance. Also, Pope Pius was known to have cached away many pieces of the Jews' confiscated art collections, not to mention their jewels, which he kept under lock and key in the catacombs, beneath the streets of the Vatican in Rome, for the Nazis. What a holy guy, he was. NOT!

I read about six history books a week. Virtually all these are linked to what I am doing on my website at the time. Currently, this means American foreign and domestic policy (1945-1968). I am of course interested in reading historians who question the way the past is normally presented. However, I am not willing to read books by historians who question the existence of the Holocaust. To me, someone who does that, given the evidence we have, must be doing this for some racist reason.

In the pursuit of knowledge we all must have a healthy skepticism and an open-mind. But we also must know when to accept a basic understanding and move on unless presented with compelling and convincing evidence.

We can not progress with our accumulation of knowledge if we get mired in debates that have been thoroughly hashed out before. In terms of history, a thorough debate over whether or not the Greeks existed or whether the Egyptians came from spaceships, it not the avenue of my study at this point. In history there are always going to be dissenting points of view from the commonly accepted knowledge. I remain open to the idea that the accepted knowledge in any area might someday be changed, but there are certain arguments that I will dismiss offhand and consider the adherent to be have an agenda, be a fool, or have an illness.

The area of Holocaust denial is one of those. In our present backlash against PC we forget that there are some reasons for operating in this world with civility. Not that controversial ideas should not be pursued but that we should use our powers of free speech or freedom not to listen to deal with people who want to spread hate or bile.

When I lived in Alabama an organization called the League of the South (then the Southern League) was formed. Their premises about history were definitely revisionist (although not too revisionist from the local presentation of the history of the Civil War and its origins I'm sure). In the university community the organization got a lot of mileage out of the liberal attacks on their views and the hypocrisy of liberal ideology that supposedly embraces free speech but also pushes to control people's freedom of expression by denouncing certain ideas.

These things should be allowed into the public forum, because, like the members of the League of the South when exposed to the light of the day, the other shoe eventually drops and the bile comes out a little more clearly. At the end of the day that is a racist organization that celebrates the good old days of antebellum America when blacks were slaves, or at least when they were properly terrorized into their proper space in southern society.

You holocaust deniers have the right to spread your rumors about what happened, and you can exploit the fact that I wasn't really there and can't really verify what happened. And crackpot scholars such as you should keep mucking around in the crevices of history to fact check accepted history. But there is an overwhelming amount of evidence that the Holocaust happened. The Nazi regime was a moment in history when people lost their control over modern Judeo-Christian values. The two major political trends that turned away from our established concepts of right and wrong or good and evil (Nazism and Marx/Lenin/Stalin/Mao-ism) unleashed more brutal killing on this world than any other forces.

Jews were exterminated. The 20th century was riddled with anti-Semitism. Holocaust deniers are crackpots. The verdict is in. And the appeal will not be received in my court until compelling new evidence arrives to reopen the case.

Until then I will see Holocaust deniers as racist, Nazi apologists, crackpots, and fools.

Answer
1933-2005
In the information age you should be able to go find information infimitum on this.

Neither of course if alive today would be so crass as to question the historical fact of the premeditated murder of millions of people by the Nazis.
The Holocaust is extremely well documented.
What of course we should be questioning are the motives of those who seek to "deny" it.

Who the heck cares about debating the subject Don? If you are onto something about how the holocaust never existed. Document it. Write it down and provide the evidence of how this horrific example of mass deception has occured.

I don't believe you can do it. But if you have something your work eventually will be received.

If you'd rather engage in shadow boxing and mental mastrubation about hypotheticals that could have happened in the gaps of the available evidence and have a debate, you definitely have the wrong audience in me.

To me history isn't Crossfire and punditry. It is evidence presented with believable interpretations. Ever since the persecution of Jews began under Nazi Germany, this has been one of the most studied subjects out there.

All of us have the responsibility of looking at this information and finding it valid or not. But until someone comes up with persuasive scholarship on the other side that moves the collective opinion of historians of the world, I'm with them and I think deniers are crackpots or (likely) worse.

Free speech exists out there. There is also accountablity for our actions and words.

YES!!!!!!!!! What a great turn of phrase. I wish I'd studied history in Tennessee...

Don, that's another tactic that those people use: Label everyone who question the Holocaust of racism. This way, you will scare away people who might research the subject. "If you open that book -books questionning the Holocaust- then you're a racist". That's not the kind of attitude you would expect from someone who runs an education forum.

Raymond, as the Warren Commission members noticed it, it is hard to prove a negative.

Raymond, can you provide us with the number of trains that arrived in Auswitch a day between Spring 1942 and November 1944? How many people contained each train?

Andy, instead of attacking people -namely Don and I- provide us with evidence. Enough of your blah-blah-blah.

[quote=John Simkin,Feb 11 2005, 07:49 AM]
[quote=Don Jeffries,Feb 10 2005, 01:37 PM]YHowever, I am not willing to read books by historians who question the existence of the Holocaust. To me, someone who does that, given the evidence we have, must be doing this for some racist reason.

[/quote]

You're wrong. There is another reason: People who don't swallow everything they read.

What a pair of utterly ridiculous and transparent posts.
I am not attacking anyone.
The onus however must logically be on the deniers to tell us what exactly they are denying and on what grounds.

I am delighted that Denis 'doesn't swallow everything he reads'

I am disappointed that both of you are apparently prepared to believe 'anything you read.'
In such an environment Mr Astucia's ridiculous books will surely sell well .

The Holocaust stands as the most significant event in living memory. But very soon, there will be few who can give testimony to the atrocities that were carried out in the name of Nazism. As memories fade, the task of those who wish to hijack history is made much easier. Alongside the resurgence of neo-nazism in Europe is a growing number who claim that the Holocaust did not happen. Holocaust denial takes many forms but its roots can be found in the age-old myth of an international Jewish conspiracy. For far-right groups that hold antisemitism at the core of their world view, Holocaust denial is a crucial tool.

This is why we need to question the motives of the Holocaust deniers.