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Merged General Holocaust denial discussion thread

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When have the open-air shooting murders of the EGs, order police, Waffen-SS, and Wehrmacht in the East ever been used to prove the use of gas chambers?

The evidence for mass shootings is inextricably linked to the evidence for gas chambers since both were methods used to carry out genocide. In swing regions like Galicia, it would make exceedingly little sense if the Nazis shot more than 200,000 Galician Jews but had not gassed the 250,000 deported to Belzec from that district. Thus evidence for mass shootings at the very least, disproves other contentions, and also makes the evidence for gassing more plausible and more believable.

That's why there are fundamentally clashing definitions of what the Holocaust was in these discussions. Deniers pretend the Holocaust was purely about extermination camps and gassing, ignoring the nearly 50% of the victims who died by shooting and starvation. Sane people have absorbed the fact that the Nazis caused large numbers to starve to death in ghettos and camps, and shot a very large number of Jews, wiping out entire communities across the occupied Soviet Union. They understand that the two methods could be used side by side. Dead is dead no matter what method was used to kill the victim.

It would be impossible to excise extermination in gas chambers from the history of the Holocaust, contrary to what Dogzilla thinks is possible. I've yet to meet a single denier who has absorbed and accepted the evidence for the mass shootings, beyond the usual throat-clearing, and could bring themselves to utter the words, 'the Nazis shot more than 2 million Jews'.
 
Search the NYT archives for "six million" and "Jews" or various combinations during the years prior to the war. You'll find them. I'd link to them but many are paid content. Alot of the reports of millions Jews on the verge of extinction while the world slumbers involved Jews in Russia and Poland and it was happening for several decades prior to Hitler taking over.
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Link away.

You won't, because you can't, and that's why you're now dancing away from your statement about the early 30's and the WJC, and have moved the goalpost to the decades before Hitler when the WJC didn't even exist.

You just don't have the balls to come right out and say it and hoping no one notices
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We wouldn't see the holocaust industry playing whack-a-mole with the deniers like we do.

what passes for 'the holocaust industry' doesn't play whack-a-mole with the deniers. It ignores them. A couple of web pages on the Holocaust museum website saying 'deniers are antisemitic liars' doesn't constitute playing whack-a-mole. It's just a public service announcement.
 
Search the NYT archives for "six million" and "Jews" or various combinations during the years prior to the war. You'll find them. I'd link to them but many are paid content. Alot of the reports of millions Jews on the verge of extinction while the world slumbers involved Jews in Russia and Poland and it was happening for several decades prior to Hitler taking over.

Dogzilla, have you any idea at all what Tsarist Russia was like?
 
The evidence for mass shootings is inextricably linked to the evidence for gas chambers since both were methods used to carry out genocide. In swing regions like Galicia, it would make exceedingly little sense if the Nazis shot more than 200,000 Galician Jews but had not gassed the 250,000 deported to Belzec from that district. Thus evidence for mass shootings at the very least, disproves other contentions, and also makes the evidence for gassing more plausible and more believable.

That's why there are fundamentally clashing definitions of what the Holocaust was in these discussions. Deniers pretend the Holocaust was purely about extermination camps and gassing, ignoring the nearly 50% of the victims who died by shooting and starvation. Sane people have absorbed the fact that the Nazis caused large numbers to starve to death in ghettos and camps, and shot a very large number of Jews, wiping out entire communities across the occupied Soviet Union. They understand that the two methods could be used side by side. Dead is dead no matter what method was used to kill the victim.

It would be impossible to excise extermination in gas chambers from the history of the Holocaust, contrary to what Dogzilla thinks is possible. I've yet to meet a single denier who has absorbed and accepted the evidence for the mass shootings, beyond the usual throat-clearing, and could bring themselves to utter the words, 'the Nazis shot more than 2 million Jews'.
There are also two other "wee" problems here: First, gassing vans were used, on a "modest" scale, in the East and in Serbia. Second, there is some good evidence that the dissatisfaction of SS leadership with mass extermination shootings led to a search for (Nebe?), and experiments in, "improved" murder methods . . .
 
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Also, kinda evokes the question of what other Holocaust there really was other than the one of the Eastern Front. I understand there were deportations and sporadic massacres elsewhere, but the brunt of the Holocaust took place on the Nazi-Soviet front and its environs. That's Holocaust 101, but it seems to be beyond Saggy's ken.

The best documented Einsatzgruppen hoax is the hoax massacre at Babi Yar, and I'm up to speed on that one. Just one thing missing from that hoax massacre, bodies. Like all the other Einsatzgruppen hoax massacres.

Perhaps the locals did go after the Jews in Lithuania, but that wasn't a result of Nazi policy.

The only reason the holohoax is moving to the eastern front is because it is evaporating in the camps, but, that ain't gonna fly either.
 
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Engaging in semantic games isn't going to get you out of the conspiracy hole. "People lying about their enemies" implies that deliberate, conscious mistruths were put forward. In which case, conspiracy. And that requires some proof to be accepted.

People lying about their enemies implies people lying about their enemies. A conspiracy requires two or more people working together toward a common goal. Conspiracy doesn't always involve lying.

As soon as you say someone is lying, then it is fairly incumbent on you to identify what the precise lies are, otherwise it's simply well-poisoning, and doesn't advance 'the truth' which is supposedly so important to you.

And btw there's no such thing as "the holocaust agenda". The term is completely meaningless. You're conflating about a dozen different issues. For someone who supposedly prizes truth, it says a lot about you that you are so willing to resort to the blancmange mode of argument.

Just off the top of my head, Simon Wiesenthal said the Nazis (his enemy) murdered five million non-Jews during the holocaust. (a lie).

No such thing as a holocaust agenda? There's no purpose behind the campaign to never forget? The memory of the holocaust is kept alive for no reason whatsoever?
 
Perhaps the locals did go after the Jews in Lithuania, but that wasn't a result of Nazi policy..
Well, I see you haven't been paying attention either. We were discussing Vilna, not Kovno, for one thing, but even at Kovno and elsewhere there is evidence of German instigation. You know that, right? You know that this evidence is in German documents, right? If you'd paid attention earlier in this thread, you would understand that the shootings in Vilna were supervised by the Germans - and carried out under their direction by Lithuanian "partisans" under German command.

The only reason the holohoax is moving to the eastern front is because it is evaporating in the camps, but, that ain't gonna fly either.
No, frankly the mass exterminations started in the East and then "moved" to the camps. Once again: about 1/2 the Jewish victims were killed outside the camps.
 
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Are you saying that if we have elements of the holocaust that have left no physical traces and we don't have any eyewitness statements except those from Jewish victims, we don't accept those elements as true?

There are massive elements of most historical events which do not leave physical traces. There are also many events where we only have eyewitness statements from one group telling us what happened, or only one source full stop. This does not seem to pose a problem for other events and epochs so why should it pose a problem here.

Case in point, fugitives describing being hunted. They give an eyewitness account saying that one of their party was shot while on the run. This would be no different to other fugitive groups describing similar situations (eg Soviet peasants or partisans, or fugitive slaves in 19th Century America, or indeed, fugitives and refugees during the American Civil War, or memoirs from the Russian Civil War, or accounts of civil wars in Africa in the past 30 years, etc etc etc).

Nobody in their right mind is going to issue a diktat whereby one cannot point to such a phenomenon or use such evidence because of the lack of another type of evidence. Nobody in their right mind is going to demand that anyone seeking to write about the conflict and mention these accounts traipse through African/Russian/Polish forests looking for the skeleton, or insist that failed or destabilised states are so efficient they're going to go traipsing round forests and properly document all such instances.

One can go up the scale. There are many massacres in early modern history where we have relatively few sources of largely 'testimonial' nature, memoirs and the like. There are also many massacres in modern history where the same applies. I've yet to see the memo from the American Historical Association or any other professional body explaining what evidence must be adduced before it is legitimate to discuss a massacre. There really don't seem to be any rules on this one. What evidence would you expect from a historian describing a bloody colonial counterinsurgency campaign or civil war in Africa any time in the last hundred years? What evidence should historians have found to describe the Red and White Terror in the Russian Civil War, and why should this be any different for the 1940s?

Answers to these questions would be welcome.

However, none of the above applies to the death camps, where we have documents, physical evidence of various kinds, and multiple groups of witnesses who saw the events from different vantage points. Whereas we still have nothing like that for UFO abductions, therefore your 'analogy' is as bogus as the last umpteen times you've tried it on.
 
The goalpost remains exactly where it always has. How does evidence of Einsatzgruppen activity prove the gas chambers?

Well, for starters the Einsatzgruppen operated gas vans, which is documented, and they even left mass graves with victims of the vans intact so that Soviet pathologists could observe unbloodied corpses of dead civilians next to locations where other sources indicated gas vans had been used.

Either Nazi Germany gassed people or it didn't. If it did, then further claims of gassing are more plausible. Indeed, the fact that there are so many cases of the use of gassing to kill people in the Third Reich poses a major problem for deniers, one that is not resolved by your Treblinka fixation.

The evolution of gassing as a killing technique came directly out of the euthanasia program, which is documented fairly well, and also encompassed early experiments with vans, then a second generation improved by one branch of the SS, the RSHA. Meanwhile, the WVHA improvised then developed gas chambers of its own, after encountering the euthanasia program through action 14 f 13, and then experimented on Soviet POWs, following on from the commissar order, in at least two camps, including Auschwitz. Thereafter, the SS at Auschwitz improved on the idea and built new crematoria with gas chambers, as is documented. A third branch were the regional commands or SSPFs and HSSPFs, who cooperated closely with the other major branches. Globocnik, SSPF Lublin, conducted some experiments with gassing, again independently of the other ventures, and then received specialists from the euthanasia program. Koppe, HSSPF Warthegau, knew some guys who had been running around killing psychiatric patients in vans, and then in conjunction with the local party boss Greiser as well as his boss Himmler, set up Chelmno, another camp which is documented.

That is a thumbnail sketch of the evolution of gassing, as it has stood ever since the late 1940s or so. It places gassing in the context of the Final Solution directly in connection with the euthanasia program and the Einsatzgruppen. So the evidence is of a piece, which is why histories of the Holocaust tend to discuss all these things together.

Since the Final Solution wasn't only carried out by gassing but also by the use of copious amounts of bullets, not just by the Einsatzgruppen but by the Police, Waffen-SS and other formations, then if we're discussing the Final Solution, aka Nazi extermination policy, aka the Holocaust (albeit not all of the Holocaust, but undoubtedly what made it become 'the Holocaust'), quite clearly the Einsatzgruppen etc are part of the Holocaust. In some regions gassing was used and then shooting became the major method, so that the two simply cannot be separated, eg in Galicia, which is 10% of the Holocaust as a whole.

It doesn't really matter which way you slice it, the extermination camps are at the centre of a Venn diagram, with multiple overlapping circles.

This is important when considering typical denier handwaves like 'all Jews are liars' since we clearly have Jewish witnesses to shooting and to gassing. Also when considering other denier handwaves like 'Nazi policy was only emigration/resettlement' since if the Nazis wiped out virtually all Jews in the occupied Soviet Union using largely bullets, then the handwave is refuted, and it makes it hard for deniers to argue that the deportations to the camps were actually destined to go to the 'Russian east' in some idyllic reservation plan, when the native Jews were being slaughtered.

The evidence is connected because it belongs in the same narrative and same explanation. That is just how the Holocaust is conventionally understood. Therefore 'gas chamber skeptics' are inevitably going to be asked how their skepticism copes with the rest of the Holocaust, since there are major logical, narrative and evidentiary problems in the apparent stance of doubting and denying the extermination camps alone.
 
Oh god, it's the bogus UFO comparison again. Look, if you can find:


  • lots and lots of documents written in Alpha Centauri
  • statements from aliens from Alpha Centauri who had done the probing
  • statements from other aliens from Alpha Centauri who witnessed the probing, but were only here to do a little shopping
  • physical evidence, including: abandoned alien anal probe centres, chemical residues compatible with alien anal probes and a big stock of alien anal probe lube, along with dump sites where probed humans were abandoned
then you can have the comparison. Until then, it doesn't work and only serves to make you look extremely silly. As in, talking out of your arse.

Irrelevant. The unbiased scholar will not demand one specific type of evidence and, if it is unavailable, will dismiss the whole thing. We don't have lots of documents written in Alpha Centauri but so what? We don't have any German documents referring to gas chambers or a plan to exterminate all the Jews.

For both UFOs and the holocaust we have primarily eyewitness statements. To analyze the veracity of these eyewitness statements we have to consider the motivation for providing them. How many disinterested third parties have come forward to testify about the holocaust? People who were uninvolved bystanders with nothing to lose or gain by testifying? People who have seen UFOs have nothing to gain and a great deal to lose by telling the world what they saw. None of them are motivated by either revenge or a desire to escape punishment.

So it's true that the evidence for the holocaust and for UFOs is not comparable. UFO eyewitnesses are of a much higher caliber. People who believe they have seen intelligent life from another planet have one more advantage: what they say they saw is actually possible. People who say three people can fit into one square foot of gas chamber space or who believe twenty eight people can be buried in one cubic meter of mass grave space are clearly deranged.
 
Given that the German people hated Communists because of their well known and flaunted slaughter of Christians the German people were fine with expelling their agents.

And this guy?

Bundesarchiv_Bild_102-12940%2C_Ernst_Th%C3%A4lmann.jpg
 
Are you saying that if we have elements of the holocaust that have left no physical traces and we don't have any eyewitness statements except those from Jewish victims, we don't accept those elements as true?

You asked the same God-damned question less than a month ago and I answered you then.

We don't reject them but we treat them with much greater caution than corroborated statements.

Luckily, there's plentiful physical evidence.
 
You asked the same God-damned question less than a month ago and I answered you then.

We don't reject them but we treat them with much greater caution than corroborated statements.

Luckily, there's plentiful physical evidence.

I came across a wonderful story about an inmate of Monowitz catching an SS officer's dog, killing it, cutting it up for meat and cooking it for his comrades. This then provoked a big hue and cry among the SS, who supposedly tried to find out what happened to the dog, but the inmate was never found out.

At the moment I only have the one source, a memoir, recounting this event. But it gives me an idea for where to look to find possible corroboration. If I don't find corroboration, then either I would express caution or confine the story to a footnote. Or I might not use the story at all.

But maybe I might come across another story which fits into a certain pattern, for example stories which could fit under the heading of 'cocking a snook at the SS'. I might then try and evaluate to what extent camp prisoners attempted or succeeded in putting one past their captors. Some examples might be well corroborated, others might not. But if the example went 'solo', it would be apparent to readers that this was so, and there is no rule in history writing that says you can't use a story if there is only one source.

Quite often, authors write things up referring to only one source, but there are in fact many sources for what they're describing. That is quite a common practice (I'm speaking here of history writing in general, not of the Holocaust alone).

In the above example, if I were unable to find corroboration easily, then I would re-read the memoir to see if there are any signs of 'boasting' or telling tall tales.

However, the story is not prima facie implausible. I've seen plenty of evidence that dogs were caught and killed by starving populations in WWII, in Belarus and Ukraine. It's hardly unique to the Koreans to eat dog. Nor is it unusual for eyewitnesses to recount mundane stories about how they supplemented their food intakes from unofficial sources. Or to recount how they got away with things that annoyed the authorities/their superiors/their captors.

In A Bridge Too Far, Cornelius Ryan recounts an interview with a British paratrooper at Arnhem who found a chicken and cooked a stew with potatoes and vegetables, which went down a storm with his comrades, so much so that he only left himself a couple of lumps of potato, which supposedly was the best tasting food he ever ate.

From an evidentiary perspective this story is identical to the Monowitz inmates describing catching and cooking a dog; there's only the one source. And the same goes for literally zillions of little stories which are woven into the historical record.
 
Irrelevant. The unbiased scholar will not demand one specific type of evidence and, if it is unavailable, will dismiss the whole thing. We don't have lots of documents written in Alpha Centauri but so what? We don't have any German documents referring to gas chambers

except we do

or a plan to exterminate all the Jews.

except we do

For both UFOs and the holocaust we have primarily eyewitness statements.

this is utterly false. Please show me a book on UFOs which cites as many documents as appear in Hilberg - a proper edition of Hilberg, doesn't matter which one, '61, '85 or '03.

To analyze the veracity of these eyewitness statements we have to consider the motivation for providing them. How many disinterested third parties have come forward to testify about the holocaust? People who were uninvolved bystanders with nothing to lose or gain by testifying?

10s of 1000s would be my estimate.

People who have seen UFOs have nothing to gain and a great deal to lose by telling the world what they saw. None of them are motivated by either revenge or a desire to escape punishment.

another apples and oranges comparison.

So it's true that the evidence for the holocaust and for UFOs is not comparable. UFO eyewitnesses are of a much higher caliber. People who believe they have seen intelligent life from another planet have one more advantage: what they say they saw is actually possible.

yet entirely unproven.

People who say three people can fit into one square foot of gas chamber space or who believe twenty eight people can be buried in one cubic meter of mass grave space are clearly deranged.

and yet, the number of such people seems to be few, compared to the total number of witnesses, and is probably no different to other groups of eyewitnesses trying to estimate crowds/dimensions, as proven by psychological experiments.

Moreover, unlike with the UFO hallucinators, we have German documents about gas chambers and extermination, and we have physical evidence corroborating the picture.
 
Deniers! If you make any of the following arguments or their variants again, then you are completely stupid! Please stop, for the sake of your tattered credibility!

1. "If Auschwitz was 4 million and now it's 1M why is it still 6M?"
2. Eisenhower/Churchill/De Gaulle
3. Comparison with UFO abductions
4. Comparison with witchcraft/devils
5. Any statement pretending the sum total of witnesses = Elie Wiesel
6. bare assertion of 'no physical evidence' as if there is absolutely none.
7. bare assertion of 'no documents'

Others, feel free to add to the top ten or twenty most ludicrously pathetic denier arguments which have been discussed to death and debunked over and over again on this and other threads.
 
I note that Rathenau was during and before World War I a noted German Nationalist and Conservative Liberal. He was heavily involved in getting Germany geared up and producing war material during the First World War. After the war, during which he supported Pan-German aims, he moderated his views and tried to work out a strategy of working within the limits of Versailles for the time period, thus shortly before his assasination he negotiated the Treaty of Rapallo with the Soviet Union, so as to eventually get out from them. This did not please some fanatical rightwing anti-semites who murdered him. two of the assassins died in the ensuing manhunt and the surviving assassin was released for good behavior in 1927.

The Nazis declared Rathenau's killers national heroes. UGH!!
 
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