dafydd
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Be patient. He probably says "do you want fries with that" all day long.
Merged General Holocaust denial discussion thread
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Be patient. He probably says "do you want fries with that" all day long.
Nick Terry
Illuminator
It's 'ad hominem', btw.
Your dishonesty is in singling out the Holocaust and holding it to an unreasonable standard of perfection. As you are a denier you are not very good at separating out the first order historical issues from the second or third order issues of representation and collective memory. How the Holocaust is commemorated today or represented in the media today seems to bother you a lot more than trying to engage with the actual history of the 1940s.
That begs questions which many deniers don't seem to want to answer. You imbibe and digest a rhetoric which attacks the actual history via how it is represented 50-70 years later. But this is obvious nonsense, as societies can easily mythologise the recent past, without that erasing the past itself. How the Russian media represents WWII and what WWII actually was are two different things, in Russia. Ditto in most other countries. Ditto with the Holocaust.
But you have been trying to compare the Holocaust to many other things all along in these discussions. You seem to think that nobody else compares the Holocaust to anything else, other than you and maybe the deniers that you read. This is clearly not so.
In academia, the Holocaust slots in to multiple perspectives. You can teach it and study it as part of Jewish history, in which case there is an implicit comparison with earlier eras of persecution, which might well lead someone to conclude that within Jewish history the Holocaust was unique. But you can also study it as part of German history and as part of European history, in which case some pretty obvious comparisons emerge, eg between Hitler and Stalin. Those are basic comparisons, and they're widely made. There is also an entire field of genocide studies whose obvious purpose is to compare different examples of genocide.
Your repeated question about why there are not other genocide museums on the Mall makes a very simple, obvious comparison between the Holocaust and other genocides. Answering why this is so might well begin with the fact that other instances of mass extinction are not always considered genocide for various reasons including lack of evidence, lack of evidence of intent, or outright psychological, sociopsychological and cultural repression. It is obviously going to be easier for American society to contemplate a genocide that happened somewhere else than it might be for American society to contemplate the complicity of its forebears in the drastic reduction in the Native American population.
A comparison like this is not difficult to make and it then provokes further questions. In comparing two situations and implying that the comparison is bad, you might say that the Holocaust's overrepresentation in American culture is the really bad thing. Or you might say that the underrepresentation of the fate of Native Americans is the really bad thing.
If it's the latter, then the obvious solution is to campaign for greater recognition and acknowledgement of the fate of Native Americans so that everyone is aware of their past. Which is by and large how Native American lobby has gone about it. Much the same can be said for other worthy candidates for public commemoration. The Armenian genocide is widely recognised as a genocide whereas 30-40 years ago this was much less common.
However, if it's the overrepresentation of the Holocaust that is the bad thing in your eyes, then you're obviously going to provoke the suspicion that your complaining is motivated by something else, such as antisemitism. Especially if all you talk about is the Holocaust and you don't discuss other similar events in depth, and only invoke them as rhetorical comparisons.
And here you demonstrate your inability to compare yet again. Either the Holocaust is sufficiently distinctive or even unique in the disconnect between academic and popular understandings, or it is not. If it is not, then it is not a unique, distinctive or intrinsic property of the Holocaust to be characterised by such a disconnect. If it is not, then your saying "there is a disconnect" is not much different to saying that there is a disconnect between American grasp of geography and maps of the real world. Which as is widely known, there is.
No, I don't. I am a realist about the ability of western societies en masse to 'get things right' in general, despite all the many efforts to educate people about how the world actually works. I am also aware that historical events are especially subject to misinterpretations and mythologisation. Those mythologisations can be studied, which is precisely what colleagues and friends of mine do, and indeed what I do to some extent with some of my work.
Joachim Neander is currently completing a book on the 'soap myth' and the 'lampshades myth' which will show how these myths originated and why they persist despite the best efforts of pretty much everyone you care to name to correct the myths.
I've said earlier in this discussion that complaining about such myths provokes a paradox, since the only way to correct them is to prescribe even more education than currently already exists. But it's a dead certainty that you would bristle if there was even more Holocaust education than currently exists.
Frankly, I don't see why the Holocaust should be singled out as the one subject where everyone is supposed to have an immaculate perfection of knowledge about what was involved, compared to any other topic in history.
Nice try, but I'm not actually much bothered by the existence of a tiny minority of Holocaust deniers. I find you guys interesting for the way you arrive at your conclusions. From experience I also know that there is very little chance of convincing a denier because they do not reason themselves into their position, therefore you cannot reason them out of it. And virtually without exception, denier antics online are self-discrediting. Which is what makes the phenomenon especially interesting.
You're probably forgetting that I am British and thus can only observe what goes on in American culture secondhand. TBH I can only get so worked up about what is and isn't taught in American high schools. There is also a transatlantic disconnect, which does not mean that British schools are automatically superior on this or any other subject, but it does mean that I view it rather differently.
You keep saying this but I don't see any evidence for it.
Hilarious hairsplitting. Proliferation and plethora both connote 'many'.
Since there are only 25 such museums in a society which boasts 15-18,0000 museums, I find it hard to see how that many museums can be considered anything much at all.
No, I pointed to the Smithsonian Natural History Museum the first time I mentioned the issue.
Who do you think you're trying to fool here?
No you wouldn't. The original point I made was that the theory of evolution is denied by a very significant proportion of American society, up to 60% according to some surveys, a number which has apparently increased. Evolution is taught as part of biology and it is part of general science education in American society as embodied in numerous museums including the Smithsonian's Museum of Natural History on the Mall, which contains dinosaur displays marked with dates that would make a YEC cry.
Your original point, I believe, was that the disconnect re: the Holocaust relates to things like soap and other mistakes about aspects of the Holocaust. There isn't a museum of Jewish soap on the mall any more than there is or would need to be a museum of evolution.
I think we get it already that you don't like USHMM.
I haven't conceded your point because I don't think it's terribly significant, for reasons I have already explained several times now. Museums are set up because some community or portion of society wants them. This is collective memory 101 FFS. What a society chooses to remember in the shape of memorials, museums etc tells us a lot about a society and will also reflect that society and culture to some extent. There are no objective criteria by which one can say, well there ought to be x number of museums on y theme in z society.
There aren't museums solely dedicated to slavery or the Native American ethnocides because neither the African American nor the Native American communities want to create such museums in a really significant way. These communities invested their political clout, resources and interest in establishing national federally funded museums about their entire histories and cultures. The American Jewish community invested its political clout, resources and interest in establishing a national museum about one aspect of their history.
The common denominator here is very clearly the ability of ethnic minorities in US society to secure national federally funded recognition of their past. American Jews led the way by establishing USHMM because they were a very wealthy community, especially in comparison to the black and American Indian communities, both of whom are notoriously poor. But the establishment of USHMM paved the way for the establishment of the two Smithsonian museums dedicated to these minorities.
American Jews are not really going to be able to turn around now and demand a museum of Jewish culture and history on the Mall, in addition to USHMM. Nor are African Americans or Native Americans going to be able to demand a museum of slavery or ethnocide.
No it's not, because you misunderstand why I pointed to the existence of some other genocide museums. I explicitly pointed out that the fallacy in your whining about why aren't there other genocide museums is that:
Both the Camodian genocide and Armenian genocide are represented in museums in America. It is entirely irrelevant how many there are because the point is whether these communities want to create such museums and whether they can. Before you can make a serious comparison you have to consider things like: the size of the immigrant/survivor community; the degree to which they have assimilated or want to assimilate into the melting pot; the importance placed in that culture on commemorating those particular events in the past; the wealth of the community; their political clout; the recognition awarded to the events by the wider society; and the supposed significance of the events in the wider culture.
Americans of Armenian ancestry number about half a million, versus American Jews numbering 6.5 million, and the Armenian-American population is by descent/ancestry whereas the American Jewish population includes more than 5 million who practice Judaism and the rest identify as Jewish culturally. Plus there are even more Americans with some Jewish roots in their family trees.
Cambodian Americans number about half a million. They are only a generation and a half away from arriving in the US with nothing much more than the shirts on their backs. They have built themselves up from very little and so the two small museums/memorials about their ordeal is about what one would expect.
That's just addressing one dimension, numbers, and there are many others to consider. But it's already pretty clear why there might be 2 museums/parts of museums for the Cambodian genocide and 25 for the Holocaust.
God you are tedious.
Unless you can show where USHMM misquoted Eisenhower then it's not disinformation.
Eisenhower's reaction to Ohrdruf and the reports from other liberated concentration camps was to expose them to publicity. How Eisenhower understood Nazi atrocities (and unless you are a complete moron, you will concede at least that he understood Ohrdruf to be a Nazi atrocity) is irrelevant to how 1990s America understood Nazi atrocities in the shape of the Holocaust. The quote is entirely appropriate to introduce Americans, who since 1945 have a vague collective memory of the shock of the liberation of the camps, to the Holocaust, whose finer details are clarified amply inside the museum, including the extent to which the camps liberated in 1945 by Allied forces contained Jewish inmates, and so on.
The Eisenhower quote speaks to a more universal perspective on Nazi atrocities which is replicated in many USHMM exhibitions that have been bannered on the plaza right next to the carved quote, eg their exhibition on Deadly Medicine about medical crimes and euthanasia, both of which mostly victimised non-Jews. Right now, the 2nd item on USHMM's homepage is about the genocide in Rwanda; there is also an exhibition about Nazi propaganda in general, which I'd hazard a guess will go a bit beyond discussing Jud Suess endlessly.
One can criticise USHMM for not being 100% consistent in how it balances between more universal and more specifically Jewish concerns, but it very clearly does not limit itself to a narrow definition of the Holocaust.
No, you said flatly 'Holocaust education'. You didn't give any indication of how much of Holocaust education might rest on emotive appeals. The impression conveyed is that it is the majority of Holocaust education. If you don't think it is a majority, then saying 'Holocaust education' is dishonest.
And in my last post I simply asked you "where is your empirical evidence that "Holocaust education in this country isn’t concerned about factual accuracy. It’s about making an emotional impact"?
I'm still waiting for empirical evidence.
Eh? Your original point said that Holocaust education "isn't concerned about factual accuracy".
I agree only that it can be, and is taught in that way, but I have yet to see any evidence about how much emotion is involved or how often. In the British education system emotion is played up in a lot of history teaching at middle school level (to GCSE) but not at A level (final two years). A pupil studying the Holocaust as part of the typical unit on the Great Dictators or German history from 1900-1945 isn't going to be taught about these events in an especially emotional way. A pupil studying GCSE history might be taught about everything in an emotional way.
No, they're actually very valid questions which you and your chums are clearly unable to answer. Deniers often ask absurd questions like 'give me the name of one gassed Jew, with proof', then fail to define proof, and show no understanding of whether the demand is actually even realistic. One can retaliate to such trolling either by asking 'give me the name of one starved Holodomor victim, with proof' or one can ask 'what happened to x'.
Likewise, questions about why the elderly and small children deserved to be deported and gassed are entirely germane. It's always very interesting to watch the mental and moral gymnastics displayed by deniers when they try to justify why the Nazis deported people who were clearly no threat to them in the middle of WWII. The question isn't appealing to emotions, it's actually asking about ethics and morality.
Your continued inability to explain the overall fate of the deported Jews is of course, simply hilarious.
I doubt this very much. Most of the participants in this thread seem to be somewhat older and many are well read regarding the history of WWII. Some might be baiting the antisemitic trolls, but people do that with Truthers and I doubt they're parroting what the physics teacher taught them about gravity when telling Truthers they're dumber than dirt.
Evidently, you still don't get the fact that everyone other than deniers considers the mere act of separating out a group and marking them as other, then deporting them solely because of their supposed otherness, as wildly abhorrent. Other examples of such behaviour in recent history, not least the treatment of African Americans, provoke similar abhorrent reactions. Like it or not, every photograph that depicts the process of racial persecution is evidence of racial persecution, which is the foundational issue for understanding the whole thing, and the third rail of contemporary discussion of the Holocaust. Deniers seem to want to continually electrocute themselves on that third rail by demonstrating their blatant racism and antisemitism over and over and over again. That's why you guys aren't widely listened to.
I've seen countless denier trolls try to parse photographs, and claim they depict perfectly normal events or that they are forgeries. That includes, of course, the Sonderkommando photographs, the Auschwitz album, the Bauleitung album, photos of mass graves, exhumations, mass shootings, deportations and much else. I'm not sure you really know very much about the photographic evidence for the Holocaust because you've worked yourself into a frenzy about the gas chambers.
I'm demanding you quantify to what extent these phenomena, which nobody denies, are characteristic of the whole. You're the one who said flatly "Holocaust education" rests on emotive appeals.
So far your attempts to illustrate the point don't really help us establish how much of Holocaust education might rest on emotive appeals, or even whether there are some schools where emotive appeals = 100% of the teaching while in other schools it's 10% or in some, zero.
I might use hyperbole occasionally; you use it most of the time. It's very difficult to get you and your chums down from the cloud nine nirvana of outrage you bring to this topic.
I don't think your hypothetical example is at all probable because the Nazi racial laws meant that Germans raping Jews was never a widespread phenomenon. By contrast, rape is known to have been much more systematically used in the Armenian genocide, in Bangladesh during the 70s massacres there, and in Bosnia. Nazis did rape some Jews and you can find some testimonies to this effect. They also set up some Jews as concubines.
But hey, I'll raise you Ka-Tzetnik's House of Dolls, which portrays the suffering of the author's sister while forced into prostitution in a concentration camp. The catch is that it's a novel and Ka-Tzetnik never claimed it was anything but a novel, despite the fact that he had indeed survived Auschwitz and lost his family in the Holocaust. There was an entire genre of Holoporn which circulated under the counter in 1960s Israeli society. In the 1970s, there was an entire genre of Nazi exploitation flicks like Ilse: She Wolf of the SS.
It's not difficult to establish that you can literally say anything about the Nazis as long as it's bad, in fiction, film and other popular culture media. The Nazis are after all the ultimate demons and villains of western civilisation, and have been since the end of the war. I'm sure this has had a deleterious influence on eyewitnesses just as other fictional depictions of wars have on those eyewitnesses.
Saying it's so don't make it so, Dogzilla. I never said anything about urban myths being perfectly rational, I said they were perfectly understandable, i.e. comprehensible. The same goes for other myths and the mechanics of how false stories and rumours spread. Old wives' tales and other phenomena are hardly unknown, are they? Nor are popular prejudices. We have no problems understanding that human beings in the ancient epoch and middle ages were in the grip of a massive number of superstitions and false beliefs, and we can often trace the rational core of them - the small fire to the large amount of smoke. We also have no problems understanding that in the modern era, superstitions, false beliefs and other myths still circulate in our societies and among specific subcultures or groups.
This is all still the fallacy of hasty generalisation. Irene Zisblatt wrote a purported Auschwitz memoir, from the evidence that exists it seems like many other Hungarian Jews she genuinely passed through the Depot in 1944 and ended up in Gross-Rosen by the autumn of that year. But she embellished her story to the point of grotesque distortion. There could well be 5-10,000 survivors of the Auschwitz depot and the Gross-Rosen complex. Many of them have left accounts in the shape of testimonies and memoirs. From everything I have seen of them Zisblatt is the rare exception, not the rule.
No matter what set we use, Zisblatt is not typical and is an extreme case. It doesn't matter whether one is examining all accounts produced by deportees who followed her path, all Hungarian Jews, all Auschwitz survivors, or just Auschwitz memoirs, you're just not going to get into a measurable percentage of Zisblatt-class memoirs or accounts no matter how hard you try.
The problem is, you're not trying, because you don't seem to recognise that you're committing the fallacy of hasty generalisation, even though this is perfectly obvious to virtually everyone else.
Up until your latest post you've never tried to express your drivel like this, so there's been nothing to refute.
In actual fact it's very easy to show that mainstream historians and journalists have done the work on exposing the outright frauds, and that there has been a great deal of criticism of accounts which are exaggerated or implausible. Deniers love to cite Moshe Peer's tall tales, but neglect to mention how his stories were so unbelievable that the disbelief of his listeners was reported in the very same newspaper stories, and they neglect to mention how his memoir has been out of print virtually since publication, and is never once cited by anyone other than deniers. Moshe Peer's exaggerations were clearly marked 'not OK'.
What does 'OK' mean anyway? You seem to concede that historians don't rely on these exaggerated or fraudulent memoirs (and before you or Saggy shift the goalposts, I am speaking about the Zisblatts and Schliefers here, i.e. your current examples). Journalists do debunk and expose some exaggerations.
Do you mean exaggerating the Holocaust is OK in the American media? Then you might have a point, but you've yet to establish that this is really so.
Likewise, the scale of the horror of the Holocaust is routinely cut down to size. You're inordinately fond of reminding us that a figure of 4 million victims at Auschwitz used to be in circulation. Now it's not. Very few media or other outlets have cited such a figure for well over twenty years.
No doubt this will trigger from you yet another whine about how the six million is carved in stone in public speeches. But as the historians' figure is 5.1 million the degree to which six million could be diminished is not great. The disconnect between academia and popular understanding can thus be measured as a very precise 85% overlap and 15% disconnect.
By comparison with the popular understanding of Stalinism versus what academics know about the Great Terror, Gulag and 1932 famine, I can assure you that the disconnect is pretty minor.
But I already said in my previous post that I'm not playing your game here because there aren't going to be cases of misinformation swinging the story in the opposite direction. There are only going to be stories which recognise that sometimes the Nazis were a bit nicer than other times, which is true. Schindler's List is one such story; it focuses on a Good German who saved the lives of more than 1000 Jews. One could at a stretch argue that the Schindler story is misinformation because Schindler wasn't quite the saint he was cracked up to be, but the story isn't outright fiction.
I really think your argument has become horribly contorted here, to the point where you cannot see where you are going off the rails. You want to contrast misinformation and lies about the Holocaust which make the Nazis look bad with something else, and claim that the misinformation and lies only go in one direction.
But I don't see why anyone would expect ANY account in history to be guaranteed free of some sort of exaggeration or embellishment. Yesterday I was talking about bombing with a colleague at university and we were discussing how the majority of initially reported casualty figures for major bombing raids are invariably exaggerated. Rotterdam was portrayed as a Luftwaffe raid that killed 40,000 people but in fact killed 850. Guernica was portrayed as a raid that killed c. 1000 but the latest figures are below 250. Dresden was portrayed as an apocalypse which slaughtered 135,000 people but it's now 25,000.
Veterans of wars routinely tell tall tales, or lie about their war records, placing themselves at battles which they never fought in. The phenomenon was absolutely epidemic in the US during the 1980s and 1990s with Vietnam war veterans. Many WWI memoirs describe the use of bayonets in a very prominent fashion but it's known that very few casualties were caused by bayonets, so bayonet use was massively exaggerated in the memories and stories told by veterans. There are many other battlefield atrocity tales whose telling and retelling constitutes a gross distortion of the nature of combat, as determined by other veterans and other sources.
But I don't know what you say is true. From all the reading I have done and from all the searching of media I would say it's very unlikely that it's true. You're the one who has made the claim that there is some sort of phenomenon here and so it's your claim, your burden of proof. Not mine.
Of course. You don't care about factual accuracy. You're a denier after all.
No, you have not. You haven't proven anything other than that there are some accounts told by survivors which are exaggerations or frauds. The mere existence of such accounts means absolutely nothing. The only way it could mean anything is if you establish that there is a preponderance or a measurable percentage which falls into that category.
If you read 100 Auschwitz memoirs then you're going to encounter a lot of descriptions of horror. Very varied horror. The range of horror at Auschwitz was immense, and included everything from the sadism of the kapos, i.e. fellow prisoners, to medical experiments to singling out certain SS men as sadists, to describing systematic executions. It's an extremely implausible claim prima facie to say that the majority of the 100 memoirs would be lying about everything or even about one thing.
But if you read 100 Auschwitz memoirs you'd also find the memoirists recounting stories about the kindness of SS officers and guards, moments of reprieve, or stories which show how it was possible for certain classes of prisoners at certain moments to have a vaguely tolerable life in the camp. It's just as implausible to claim that all those stories are untrue. In the bigger picture, these stories make only so much difference. Auschwitz killed off a lot of registered inmates in its 'camp' function (leaving aside extermination), and some of the SS officers who displayed kindness or improved the lot of prisoners also perpetrated horrific crimes. Men like Hoessler, Wirths and Liebehenschel emerge from the composite picture portrayed by Auschwitz memoirs as anything other than unrelenting brutes. But they all participated in crimes to the extent that two were executed and one committed suicide to avoid almost inevitable execution.
The grey zone, to use Primo Levi's famous phrase, is much broader than you seem to think, and encompasses the perpetrators as well as the victims, both of whom could end up in morally ambiguous situations.
No, I proposed that you substantiate your claims. If you don't want to do so that's fine, but then your claims will not be substantiated and carry no weight.
It's indeed completely ludicrous. You are trying to defend an unsubstantiated claim that there is a significant and distinctive trend towards exaggerating or falsifying stories about the Holocaust which make the Nazis look bad by shifting burden of proof and thoroughly confusing yourself in the process.
Que?
Oh so now we're back to scholars and moving away from the disconnect with the public.
If you say so. Personally I think it doesn't take a genius to grasp that the survivors were selected for work and had to run a very unpleasant gauntlet to make it out of the war alive. There are enough studies of concentration camps analysing survival chances and why certain cohorts suffered more than others that it's really, really, really tilting at windmills to claim that the survival of some might somehow disprove or diminish the deaths of others.
This is repetitive gibberish.
I've already said I'm not playing your game, and it doesn't make any logical sense anyway. You're the one claiming systemic or endemic or I don't know what kind of lying, you prove it. My not being able to point to examples of something that don't exist means nothing other than you've flipped. Literally. There is no mirror image equality here, and no reason to expect that there would be some kind of even distribution pattern of mistakes/lies 'for' and 'against' something.
There are no such sources. Their nonexistence means nothing other than accepted and respected sources do not wilfully underestimate death tolls which have been established reasonably precisely according to the best available evidence.
I could just as easily ask you for an accepted and respected source saying the death toll at Dresden is 12,000 instead of 25,000, and you're not going to find that either.
dafydd
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Nazis,not Germans,mein kleine Hitler groupie. The Nazis were as depraved as you can get.
LemmyCaution
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The reasoning here, if we can call it that, is absurd, as though there is some kind of tit-for-tat to history, and conclusions about events are rated "bad" or "good" and must be in some kind of balance.
Beyond the pathetic plea to ignore the research is a grave misunderstanding of the research and how it has developed. In fact, it is rather easy to find a single, or better a sustained, incident of misinformation that swings the Holocaust in the opposite direction, to paraphrase Dogzilla.
For about two or three decades following the war, the history of the Wehrmacht was pretty much a fabrication created by military men on both sides of the conflict in a kind of tacit gentlemen's understanding. In the immediate post war period, former German military leaders spread a false version of their service and the role of the military, covering up their criminal actions and their collaboration with the SS (to make this clear for deniers: they lied, told porkies, dissembled, on the lecture circuit and in print). Basing their conclusions on these self-serving and downright dishonest memoirs and other writings by former German military leaders, the historians of this period helped foster a mythical German military: in this mythic view the German military, even in the East, fought a heroic war with bravery and honor; it took on the expansionist Communist colossus on the best terms it could given the nature of that enemy; it kept itself clean and uninvolved with unpleasant matters, which were all at the feet of Himmler or Hitler and disconnected, in this version, from the military.
Erased in this dishonest version of the history were the military's participation in pre-war plans including the so-called criminal orders, the Wehrmacht's understanding and cooperation with the Einsatzgruppen, the army's participation in various roles in the mass executions of Jews, the dirty war conducted against the civilian population under cover of anti-partisan warfare, the Germans' violation of international agreements they had signed, the crimes against POWs including mass murder, the economic measures taken in the East to starve the local population and divert resources from them, reprisals and collective punishment claiming the lives of many innocents, and so on.
This version of the record of the German military, with its effacement of the significant portions of the military's plans and operations, was worse than a light sanitizing of the German military; it was a suppression of ugly facts aimed at exoneration of criminality and the creation of a mythological Wehrmacht. I think too that the early Cold War, and the integration of Germany into the postwar order, helped solidify the myth of the unsullied Wehrmacht. The underside of things was only slowly re-discovered and brought back into the light of day by a new generation of historians working in the archives, connecting military history to the genocide, and asking questions where mythology and cover-ups had prevailed.
Yes, chalk another "bad Germans" up on Dogzilla's inane scorecard. The problem for Dogzilla, however, is of course that a new generation of historians asked uncomfortable questions about Dogzilla's heroes, worked over the evidence, and wrote about what they were finding, unconcerned with either whitewashing or vilifying. What they found was a military with significant parts of the leadership that were "nazified" or happy to ally with the Nazis--and which as a result conducted the war in part in concert with the Third Reich's criminal intentions and plans.
The revision which historians started making in the late 1960s in the case of the record of the Wehrmacht in the East was, obviously, the opposite that Dogzilla would want--but recall that Dogzilla wants a particular outcome here, that is, whitewashing of Nazi criminality--not an accurate history based on evidence. What Dogzilla is after is a mythical history that exonerates war criminals as part of his wishful thinking, his prejudices and emotions, and a bizarre and untenable notion of fairness. Tough luck for Dogzilla. The revisionist history of the German military showed the complicity of the army, and much of its leadership, in Nazi war crimes. Chips falling where they will, eh.
By the way, Nick Terry's reply to Dogzilla was excellent.
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Corsair 115
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The supply lines (by which I assume you mean the rail lines) to the camps were not bombed as a target unto themselves. Rather, railway lines, marshalling yards, and repair shops all over Germany were bombed as part of the Transportation Plan, an effort intended to hinder Germany's ability to move goods and people, which would impact its capacity to conduct and support its military operations as well as disrupt its economy. The latter in particular the Transportation Plan accomplished exceedingly well.
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The whitewashing of the German Armed Forces in World War II was a joint effort of both certain Western, mainly military historians and German / Nazi officiers. L. Hart's The Other Side of the Hill is a prominent example of this literature. One should also mention the abundant Memoir literature such as Guderian's Panzer Leader for example. Much of this literature is characterized by mendacity, fraud and myth making.
The myths that they propagated included such things as the German armed forces not being involved in atrocities and being apolitical. Further among the mytths is the notion that the German armed forces werte bound by notions of honour and loyalty so that they had to stay loyal to the Nazi state until the end because they were honoured bound to do so. And of course they took their oaths of loyalty absolutely seriously because they were honourable men.
Of course the above portrait was a self serving series of lies and rationalizations. For example regarding oaths. In the 1920's many officiers took oaths of loyalty to the Weimer Republic, and various other oaths to abide by various international threaties. Oaths that many of them violated. After the war may of violated their oaths to tell the truth in courts of law. Isn't it just so interesting that for some reason their oath of loyalty to Hitler and the Hitler regime was sacrosanct but not these others.
That the memoir literature of many of the German officiers wrote after the war was full of ommissions and distortions is now so claear that their is no dispute that it can't be taken on faith.
General von Rundstedt denied in sworn testimony after the war that he had not seen a notorious order justifying the murder of Jews and calling for German troops to support it. Well the truth of the matter was that he had seen it and endorsed it and had further sent directives to other other commanders suggesting further similar directives. So much for taking oaths seriously.
What is also almost entirely abscent from the appologetic literature is that members of the German armed forces were reciving large tax exempt secret bribes from the Nazi state all in return for their loyalty. For example Field Marshals and Grand Admirals received 4000 RM, (Reichmarks), per month. Generals and General Admirals received 2000 RM per month.
Of course the upper reaches of the German armed forces were up to their necks in the plan for the war of annihilation that was planned before Barbarossa was launched. And after it was launched they were up to their necks in the various anti-partisan "actions" which were ussually no better than mass murder expeditions in which vasst number of civlians were killed. Instead the memoir literature whined about how brutal, and cruel and barbaric the partisans and the Soviet army was. Ignoring and downplaying their war of annihilation in the East.
Well it appears that thanks to the opening of the Soviet archives since the fall of Communism that the number of people murdered directly and indirectly by the Stalin regime has been drastically revised downwards. (It still numbers many millions). Further the usual story of the Soviet's killing over a million German POW's and that c. 2 million German civlians died fleeing from the Red Army and from massacre and forced expulsion after the war as also to be massively revised downward to probably alltogether less than 1.5 million.
Much of the German armed forces were up to their necks involved in atrocities, along with being throughly corrupted and co-opted by the Nazi regime.
Uzzy
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Additionally, in the post war period, there was a tendency to not dig too deep into the actions of the past in West Germany, as many of the people indirectly involved in these crimes were needed to do things like staff the civil service, or lead the military. West Germany focused on rebuilding, rather then exorcising the sins of the past, at least until the late 1960's.
Clayton Moore
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Is this some sort of joke? Show some respect.
Clayton Moore
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Are you kidding? Terry's self aggrandizing and verbose post would have made me do big chunks if I was a weak sister.
Your Holocaust is so obviously a fraud for millions of reasons. If millions, over 10 million, including 3 million Jewish people in gas chambers, how could thousands maybe even tens of thousands of allegedly guilty murderers be allowed to go free after slaughtering millions?
If they, the German guards, knew of millions people being killed at Polish camps would they have stayed till the camps were liberated?
Matthew Ellard
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No it is not a joke. I have read most of the holocaust denier "papers" and books. I am directly saying that you haven't read anything, either conventional history or holocaust denial "papers" and that you made up the 300,000 figure on the spot.
Link me to the citation that you claim supports this 300,000 figure.
Matthew Ellard
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Real Basic History
'SonderAktion1005" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonderaktion_1005
The Germans did not wait for the Red Army to arrive at Treblinka. Please read some basic history before posting again.
Clayton Moore
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Morganthau
http://www.experienceproject.com/stories/Wonder-Why-The-Us-Cant-Play-Well-With-Others/1521826
Quickly scrapped? You believe anything propagandists tell you?
Scumbag mass murderer Henry Morgenthau, Jr. Henry Morgenthau, Jr. died February 6, 1967(aged 75).
So there is no need to suck up.
If you need a live scumbag to suck up to and drool about this one is still alive.
Clayton Moore
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Can someone tell me which classifications of Jews/prisoners went straight to the gas chambers? First it's kids and old people. Then people who can't work. Has anything been recently declassified about this?
little grey rabbit
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Was this v.Reichnau's order of October 10 1941.
Verhalten der Truppe im Ostraum?
Strangely I have a translation issued by V. Molotov in 1942, published that same year in a collection We Shall Not Forgive by the Foreign Languages Publishing House Moscow, 1942, pages 38-39. And it totally omits the famous passage concerning measures against Jews.
I will quote it for you.
Command of 6th Army Dept. 1a - File 7 Army HQ, October 10,1941
Re: Conduct of Troops in Eastern Area
As regards the conduct of the troops toward the Bolshevik system, there is still much lack of clarity. The essential aim of the campaign against Jewish-Bolshevik system is the complete demolition of its instruments of power and the extirpation of the Asiatic influence in the European sphere of culture.
Consequently the troops are faced with tasks that transcent the usual scope of duty of a soldier.
[Section regarding measures against Jews normally found here - but missing in this 1942 published version]
The question of fight the enemy behind our lines is not yet treated seriously enough. Cruel, wily guerillas and atrocious females are still being taken prisoner. Men bearing firearms and wearing semi-military or entirely civilian dress who had been caught lying in ambush as well as tramps are still being treated like regular soldiers and sent to war prisoner camps. Captured Russian officers relate with sarcastic smiles that Soviet agents freely walk the streets and are often fed from German field kitchens. Such conduct on the part of our trrops can only be attributed to sheer frivolousness. Those in charge must immediately enlighten the men on the significance of the present struggle
And so on, as per the other versions of this document.
So it appears that there were versions of this document which did not refer to mass reprisals directed at Jews, so perhaps Rundstadt had only seen these ones?
Clayton Moore
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Were you trying to be funny there?
There are no Holocaust deniers. Everyone knows there was a Holocaust. The Nick Terry types lie about that all the time. Why do they lie if EVERYONE agrees there was a Holocaust?
Nick, your post is so lengthy and full of important stuff that I through a dart at your post which landed on
USHMM
I googled it and came up with
http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10005537
It was quite the confusing museum piece. It was almost like the modern art that you dip brushes into different cans of paint and fling it on from the brushes.
I see this.
Then came this which contradicts the Holocaust kill them all premise.
Then it explains
Forced labor and the dreadful conditions and that "The production of aircraft parts thus dominated labor deployment in the Flossenbürg system by 1944."
Which begs the question "How to you brutalize workers and expect them to produce quality aircraft parts?"
And finally this.
So it seems that after sending 12 Jewish people to be killed in gas chambers they decided not kill 23,000 Jewish people who were sent from other camps.
About 5000 Jewish were accounted for as died or evacuated. Leaving almost 17,000 Jewish people unaccounted for.
There are no Holocaust deniers. Everyone knows there was a Holocaust. The Nick Terry types lie about that all the time. Why do they lie if EVERYONE agrees there was a Holocaust?
Matthew Ellard
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It was not about classification. It was an activity performed on arrival at camps based on an assessment of ability to work. People who were able to work were registered. People not suitable for work were not registered and executed.
Entire families often arrived in Auschwitz, but soon after their arrival, they were broken apart. In Auschwitz-Birkenau, Jews were thrown out of the cattle cars without their belongings and forced to make two separate lines, men and women/children. SS medical personnel, including the infamous Dr. Josef Mengele, conducted selections among these lines.
http://isurvived.org/AUSCHWITZ_TheCamp.html
Here are photos of the selection process at various camps. .
http://isurvived.org/Pictures_iSurvived-4/Birkenau-selection_BW.GIF
http://www.knowledgerush.com/wiki_image/8/89/Selection_Birkenau_ramp.jpg
http://www.hmd.org.uk/assets/downloads/233_Selection_of_Jews_on_arrival_at_Auschwitz.jpg
Please be aware that at camps like Treblinka II there was no labour required and thus all inmates were executed. None were registered. The commanding officer Kurt Franz explains the process leading towards execution in detail....read it. "I cannot say how many Jews in total were gassed in Treblinka. On average each day a large train arrived. Sometimes there were even two. This however was not so common......."
Uzzy
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Well yes, I would call two years a quick scrapping. JCS 1067 was the first stage of US policy towards Germany, which was largely based on the Morganthau Plan. This was replaced in the summer of 1947 by JCS 1779, which was a plan to help Germany recover economically.
The Morganthau Plan was misguided, but an understandable case of wartime hatred driving policy. It was not an attempted genocide, nor a use of food as a weapon, but an attempt to restrict the German standard of living so that they would 'feel defeated'. Either way, when the Americans realised it was counter-productive to their aims, stopping Communism and rebuilding the European economy, they scrapped it.
Seriously, read some history.
LemmyCaution
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I am beginning to think that LGR has a point with you. That you are a fake revisionist planting incredibly stupid remarks to embarrass him even more than he embarrasses himself.
Think about this statement of yours, and then think about the status of Chelmno, Treblinka, Sobibor, and Belzec on the arrival of Allied forces into those areas. Think too about the last days of Auschwitz-Birkenau and who was left in that camp when the Red Army arrived. Also a "lesser" camp like Majdanek.
Please tell us which camps were liberated by Allied forces, and then count and name the German staff and guards taken by the liberators of these camps.
If you need help with sources for the above, don't be shy. Ask. I imagine many here will be willing to help you. I am not willing because I think you should work this out for yourself.
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LemmyCaution
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With the important caveat that at AR camps a very small number (eg Jules Schelvis) were dispatched to work camps and a somewhat larger number were kept alive temporarily to work in shops servicing the camps, as ramp workers and sorters, and as SK in the killing sections of the camps. The camp service, ramp, and sorting workers were those who organized and staged revolts and breakouts at Sobibor and Treblinka.
little grey rabbit
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Clayton Moore embarrasses me? Hardly.
His function here is not primarily to discredit revisionism - although he does try - mainly it is to give you, Dr Terry, Matthew Ellard et al. someone to debate whom you will be able to best in an argument and so avoid discussions on points and issues which are vulnerable.
You are quite literally engage in fake disputation.
For example, Dr Terry loudly proclaimed that a polish newspaper article from 1942 had to be fake because it talked about Treblinka II as a gassing camp before it had officially opened. Then I pointed out this was just one of many pre-Treblinka Treblinka II references.
True revisionists or deniers would be crowing and leaping on this.
Clayton Moore just continues throwing up his weak strawmen. But that is all Team Insanity can cope with these days.
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