When I hear the Holocaust is a Jewish conspiracy, I envision a group of Jews who all know the Holocaust is a fabrication but who work in concert to foist it upon an ignorant and unsuspecting world. That to me is the essence of a Jewish conspiracy view of the holocaust. That is what I think is stupid.
Then much of 'Holocaust revisionism' is stupid, since its hare seems to be chasing a Jewish conspiracy to defraud the world. It wouldn't be difficult to line up quotes from Rassinier, Faurisson, Butz etc, or indeed our very own Saggy, who gave a classic example not that many posts above.
Torture and forgery aren't a necessary part of conspiracy in my mind. Torture and forgery has been alleged in connection with the holocaust but so what? You can have torture and forgery without Jews.
And alleging torture or forgery is alleging a conspiracy. Please don't play semantic games here and fixate on the Jewish side of the conspiracy. I stated in my previous post that the more sophisticated deniers blame other conspiratorial entities suh as the Soviets. I also stated that some 'revisionists' try to blame the zeitgeist or claim the whole thing was a 'hystory', but all of them sooner or later start having to alleged forgery or torture in the end anyway.
Indeed, the lack of explanation for the 'hoax' is one of the many reasons why revisionism is regarded as laughable nonsense.
Abusing enemy combatants in captivity is unfortunately all too common. Recognizing and acknowledging the fact that Germans were mistreated in Allied custody isn't the same thing as alleging there is a giant conspiracy. It's simply a fact that Germans were tortured.
Is it? Please present
evidence that a majority of SS men involved in the death camps and shooting squads who carried out the Holocaust were tortured. You do know this is a sceptics' forum and you are required to provide evidence for your assertions, don't you?
The examples had better be more than one and must all relate to the death camps and shooting squads.
But the fact that they were tortured doesn't mean that they were always tortured or that all incriminating statements they made were a result of the torture. I don't reject a statement because I think the person was tortured. If I reject a statement it's because the statement is so patently false that only a moron would believe it.
Your blithe assertion that a statement is 'so patently false' is contradicted, as a matter of record, by the decisions of judges and jurors several thousand times over, who convicted Nazis time and again under a variety of legal systems - martial law, common law, continental law - not to mention the assessments of many thousands more historians and journalists, regarding these events.
You also seem to be labouring under the falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus delusion that is, quite literally, medieval thinking. A witness may
exaggerate but hyperbole is an inherent part of how human beings express themselves. I have honestly never understood the denier mind when it comes to leaping from exaggeration to 'it didn't happen'. It doesn't seem terribly logical to me.
It is now thoroughly well established - and a matter of common sense - that human memory for dates, distances, durations, colours and numbers is thoroughly imperfect. The proverbial 'witnesses to a car crash' and 'Rashomon' effects sum up the problem perfectly well.
I don't know what you mean by "forgery"
You don't know what I mean by forgery? Then you are a disingenuous liar. There are many documents which prove the mass extermination of Jews and other target groups, using explicit language that cannot be explained away. For example, two documents explicitly describe the killing process in gas vans. Every revisionist thinks these were forged.
but if allegations of Jew-fat soap or the shrunken heads presented into evidence at Nuremberg weren't forgeries, they were definitely examples of fabricated evidence that people believed to be true at the time. You don't need a Jewish conspiracy to explain how that happened.
And here you are confusing a number of issues, none of which relate directly to the core elements of the Holocaust.
There were never any allegations of 'Jewish soap' presented to war crimes trials, there was a claim that at the Danzig Anatomy Institute, German pathologists manufactured soap from human remains of Poles and Germans. It is a discrete claim that coincided with a very widespread wartime rumour that Jews were being 'turned into soap'. My colleague Joachim Neander has investigated the Danzig soap case thoroughly and shown how there was a small fire to the fog of war, but no overt, planned 'soap manufacture' - macerated bodyfat was a by product of anatomical processes The Soviet investigators were guilty of wishful thinking and encouraging witnesses to embellish a true core story. Not to invent it out of thin air.
The claim that Professor Spanner had 'turned corpses into soap' was then investigated by West German detectives, yet no charges were brought and no further evidence was manufactured. This already stands in stark contrast to evidence for gas chambers, since not only was every single investigating nation in 1945 receiving eyewitness accounts of gas chambers, every single nation-state whose police and legal systems investigated thereafter kept on receiving them.
By contrast, other than the Danzig Anatomy Institute case, no evidence came to light that 'soap making' was carried out anywhere else.
You have just advanced an argument by analogy, which presumes that if "they did it" in x case then they must have done it in y case. The same is true of 'shrunken heads'. That is not genocide and did not concern Jewish concentration camp prisoners. Contrary to the claims of deniers, the shrunken heads appear to be genuine.
But it is quite an inferential leap to go from assuming a fake in this instance, and assuming that the manifold charges relating to all concentration camps are untrue or unfounded. It is in fact about as stupid as the other indirect denier gambit of the Dachau gas chamber. A gas chamber was found at Dachau at the end of the war, but only one witness came forward to claim that it had actually been used. That is pretty much the living definition of the Scottish 'not proven' verdict. The information is too thin to
decide either way. What is certain, however, is that if the chamber was used, it was used in the context of Nazi medical experiments which are copiously documented - and which do not speak to the core of the Holocaust.
You don't need to allege a Jewish conspiracy to explain why the Nuremberg Trials are pretty much worthless as evidence of any German wrongdoing and particularly of the Holocaust. Anybody with remedial knowledge of the law can look at Article 19 and 21 of the Charter for the International Military Tribunal to see that.
Unfortunately you need more than remedial knowledge of law to know that continental legal systems do not have US style rules of evidence. Please google 'Grundsatz der freien Beweisfuehrung' and twig that the Germanic legal systems in Germany, Austria and Switzerland have absolutely no such rules of inclusion or exclusion, not even today. It wasn't until 1995 that the Bundesgerichtshof introduced a ruling that laid down greater caution regarding hearsay evidence - evidence which moreover is entirely admissible into common law courts under a multiplicity of exceptions to the hearsay rule.
Dismissing the Nuremberg Trials, aside from being a transparent act of well poisoning, also ignores the fact that it was not at the trials that the crimes were proven. They had been proven just like any other murder before the trials in the course of investigations. The purpose of trials is to establish the guilt or innocence of individual defendants. The Allies need not have held trials and the Holocaust would still be a matter of historical fact - the evidence would have come out another way.
You don't need to claim either a vast conspiracy or a hoax by telepathy to explain why various confessions and documents appear to corroborate either. In actuality the corroboration between various eyewitnesses is so weak that it's better evidence that there was no conspiracy.
No, the corroboration is far from weak. But let's put your assertion to the test. Please explain to us why an SS captain and a Polish Jewish Sonderkommando would both have named the first gas chambers at Birkenau 'the Bunkers', without invoking a conspiracy or telepathy.
We will go on adding examples thereafter.
People don't reject for example the Gerstein statement because it is part of the Jewish conspiracy. It's rejected because the circumstances under which it came to light is unbelievable, he shall we say "inflated" some of his estimates of time and space, and no corroborating physical evidence of his claims have been found.
Unfortunately 'people' as a collective entity do not reject the Gerstein statement. Deniers reject the Gerstein statement. Everyone else realises that it is a very emotional account of a gassing at Belzec which includes numerous exaggerated numbers - on closer analysis of the evidence, he appears to have been repeating boastful propaganda of the Lublin SS regarding the capacity of the gas chambers - which was substantially corroborated by not only the testimonies of the few Belzec survivors and by the entirely probative evidence of the villagers nearby, but in due course by the testimonies of SS and Ukrainian witnesses, and by the testimonies of other survivors, bystanders, visitors, SS personnel and Ukrainian guards to the other Aktion Reinhard camps, not to mention by a fair number of documents, the documents proving conclusively that the Aktion Reinhard camps of Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka were a set, thereby making evidence for one camp evidence for all.
While Gerstein did not describe open-air cremations at Belzec, others did, and post-liberation site inspections at this and the other death camps confirmed this visually. In recent decades, archaeological investigations have established the presence of substantial mass graves at these sites - especially at Belzec, Sobibor and Chelmno - and visitors over the decades, even up to the present day, keep on reporting kicking over bone fragments on these sites. Meanwhile, to answer an earlier troll of yours, witnesses describe the removal of human cremains - ash and bones - from the sites during the cremation phase.
Studying the holocaust doesn't force you into an either/or situation: Either you accept all the fantastical idiotic evidence of the holocaust without thinking or you believe in the Jewish conspiracy. It is frankly bizarre and disturbing that you would think that every doubt or question about impropriety or every allegation of torture or forgery is an attack on the Jews. Bad things can happen without the Jews being involved.
There's no Jewish conspiracy but that doesn't make everything about the holocaust true.
You managed to sneak an either/or in there anyway, and it's a strawman.
In both law and history, the critical assessment of evidence does not imply that one accepts all statements as conclusive - it is by contrasting sources and converging evidence that lawyers and historians reach their conclusions.
Thus while almost all Auschwitz survivors gave testimony in 1945 providing exaggerated estimates of 4 or even more million deaths there, historians have rejected
those parts of the testimonies as understandable exaggerations since there is no corroboration from other sources of deportations to the camp on that scale. The documents and eyewitnesses outside the camp indicate instead a lower number of around 1 million who died there.
So carry on - let's see how you can argue for no Holocaust/no gas chambers
without sooner or later invoking a conspiracy of some kind.
