The Holocaust 1933-1945

[Denis Morissette]

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...

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

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?

[Mike Tribe]

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?

[Denis Morissette]

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?

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

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!

[John Simkin]

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.

[UlrikeSchuhFricke]

then why wouldn't you simply shoot them? Why build these gas chambers and crematoriums, with the obvious danger inherent to your own troops from the lethal gas? Not to mention all the logistical problems; it certainly was a longer, more involved process than there would have been if they shot them.

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.

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.

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.

Edited February 10, 2005 by UlrikeSchuhFricke

[John Simkin]

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

[Pamela Brown]

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

[Mike Tribe]

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."

[Terry Mauro]

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.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

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!

[John Simkin]

You seem to have a fair and independent mind. Have you ever considered reading one of the books by historical revisionists?

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.

[Raymond Blair]

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.

[Raymond Blair]

Raymond,

Exactly when has any holocaust "debate" been held, yet alone thoroughly rehashed?

Answer

1933-2005

In the information age you should be able to go find information infimitum on this.

[Guest]

If only there were writers alive today like H.L. Mencken and George Orwell; one can only imagine what they'd do with this subject.

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.

[Raymond Blair]

No debate has ever been allowed on this subject,

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.

[Mike Tribe]

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.

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