Merged General Holocaust denial discussion thread

[Clayton Moore]

Clayton? Dogzilla? Can you explain this for me?

http://www.independent.ie/world-new...s-graves-at-treblinka-death-camp-2990076.html

And this gem.

Survivor Kalman Taigman remembers his arrival at the camp's railway station, packed into a cattle wagon.

"I was with my mother. We were about 100 people in a wagon. They opened the doors, firing guns and hitting us, and sent us into a yard. I ran with my mother and tried to calm her.

"They told me to leave my mother but I didn't do it quickly and I was hit on the head. When I got up, she was gone. She went with all the rest of the women to the gas chamber."

Incredible.

 

[LemmyCaution]

And this gem.



Incredible.

Sturdy Colls' plans got deniers' knickers in a twist on another discussion board - until they breathed a sigh of relief when her project "went quiet": "Fantastic work, Caroline," wrote one denier there, reveling in his sarcasm, "enjoy the backdoor PhD you are earning by not visiting and searching for the mass graves of Treblinka."

Clayton Moore's critique is quite interesting, a kind of mini tour de force. Rather than deal with Sturdy Colls' findings, he takes The Independent's reporter to task for announcing Sturdy Colls' discovery by means of a common idiom with which Clayton is unfamiliar. Then, when that line of attack flops, he goes after the reporter again, for including a quotation, to which Clayton objects, from a survivor.

Why on earth Clayton thinks that the point of Matthew Ellard's post was the quality of press reportage is beyond me; what is clear is that Clayton doesn't know what to say about the findings themselves.

 

[LemmyCaution]

Dogzilla has had a golden opportunity to advance the cause of denial by showing how 5 cities - Vilna, Lodz, Warsaw, Riga, and Kiev - exemplify the Nazi policy of deportation of Jews for resettlement.

Instead of seizing the opportunity to show how the "official story" is wrong, 1) he has said he doesn't know and he doesn't care what happened to the Jews who were living in these cities, 2) he has called the question where the Jews were deported to a moronic gambit, 3) he has ignored census data and other information to imply that there weren't very many Jews living in these places in the first place, 4) he has ignored information on postwar population in these places to imply that there were many Jews living there at the end of the war, and 5) he has tried obfuscating the specific question about 5 cities with waffle on European-wide demographics.

To anyone reading this thread, Dogzilla's dodging of this topic - just as he has dodged the opportunity to back up his claims that the Jaeger Report is evidence for anti-partisan warfare, resettlement, and rogue excesses in the Baltics - is obvious.

My question about this pattern of dodging is more for non-deniers and about denial. It is a bit perplexing. Ostensibly, deniers aim to critique the work done by historians showing the scope, methodology, purpose, and evolution of the Holocaust and other Nazi war crimes. Repeating a limited set of ready-made gambits (Wiesel, no mass graves, Jews went where Jews are, they wouldn't have, etc.), deniers have isolated themselves from the general public and further cannot even get a seat at the table, so to speak, where specialist discourse about these matters occurs. Their approach has failed and put them on a far fringe. Yet, taking Dogzilla's non-response to just two specific topics (I could list out others), we have here a case study of a denier walking away from an opportunity to convince readers of this thread of his claims - saying "I don't know and I don't care."

Sometimes it appears that one purpose of denial is simply to be on a far fringe ("get people hopping mad"); sometimes it appears that ideological and political agendas are the motivation. But "I don't know and I don't care" is really poor strategy to advance ideological or political agendas, no?

What gives? What are deniers really up to?

 

[Clayton Moore]

Sturdy Colls' plans got deniers' knickers in a twist on another discussion board - until they breathed a sigh of relief when her project "went quiet": "Fantastic work, Caroline, enjoy the backdoor PhD you are earning by not visiting and searching for the mass graves of Treblinka."

Please explain.

 

[Clayton Moore]

My question about this has to do with denial. It is a bit perplexing. Ostensibly, deniers aim to critique the work done by historians showing the scope, methodology, purpose, and evolution of the Holocaust and other Nazi war crimes. Repeating a limited set of ready-made gambits (Wiesel, no mass graves, Jews went where Jews are, they wouldn't have, etc.), deniers have isolated themselves from the general public and further cannot even get a seat at the table, so to speak, where specialist discourse about these matters occurs. Their approach has failed and put them on a far fringe. Yet, taking Dogzilla's non-response to just two specific topics (I could list out others), we have here a case study of a denier walking away from an opportunity to convince readers of this thread of his claims - saying "I don't know and I don't care."

What gives? What are deniers really up to?

The revisionists are up to here with the doublespeak of Team Holocaust.

When a pathological liar like Elie Wiesel is the figurehead for the Holocaust and gets a Nobel prize something is askew with the Holocaust history demanded to be accurate. Something is very askew.

 

[Clayton Moore]

No one has even attempted to explain why millions of Jewish people, likely the most educated and most tight knit religious group in Europe at that time, remained in Europe as million after million Jewish people were allegedly exterminated?


The reason?

It never happened.

 

[LemmyCaution]

Please explain.

At RODOH, after Sturdy Colls' announced this project some time ago, deniers - ignoring Roberto Muehlenkamp's summaries of forensic findings at AR camps - got all worked up. When press discussion subsided, the deniers engaged in variants of their usual conspiratorial fantasizing - and concluded that, since by denier definition there can be nothing to find at Treblinka, Sturdy Colls' had given up out of fear for her career and turned to "safer" topics. As usual, denier "theorizing" is disproven by the facts.

The revisionists are up to here with the doublespeak of Team Holocaust.

If revs are fed up with what historians can demonstrate, why on earth would they not take the opportunity to point out the presumed problems with what they object to? All you have said is what I said, revs object to various arguments and discussions, yet they dodge and run. You are answering my question by rephrasing the problem! Or are you saying that revs have given up trying to make their case and are content with being an isolated fringe group taken seriously by almost no one?

No one has even attempted to explain why millions of Jewish people, likely the most educated and most tight knit religious group in Europe at that time, remained in Europe as million after million Jewish people were allegedly exterminated?

Then you will have to explain why I am reading a full book on precisely this topic - Yosef Gorny, The Jewish Press and the Holocaust, 1939-1945, and why this is far from the first thing I've read on the topic. (Leaving aside, of course, your strange and ill-informed depiction of Europe's Jews as "tight knit.") My guess is that you aren't all that familiar with the basic works on the Holocaust or Jews in Europe. Judging from this post and others you've made. Just sayin'.

 

[Bluespaceoddity]

Clayton? Dogzilla? Can you explain this for me?

http://www.independent.ie/world-new...s-graves-at-treblinka-death-camp-2990076.html

The Independent
16th January 2012

British forensic archaeologist Caroline Sturdy Colls has now undertaken the first co-ordinated scientific attempt to locate the graves..........

Her work at the site, where the Nazis tried to destroy all traces of industrial-scale killing, is being followed in forthcoming Radio 4 documentary The Hidden Graves Of The Holocaust..........

..... the ground-penetrating radar had also discovered the foundations of buildings and that two are likely to have been gas chambers.......


She added: "I've identified a number of buried pits using geophysical techniques. These are considerable in size, and very deep, one in particular is 26 by 17 metres."......

Thanks for the heads up, Matthew Ellard. The broadcast can be heard around the world.

 

[TSR]

No one has even attempted to explain why millions of Jewish people, likely the most educated and most tight knit religious group in Europe at that time, remained in Europe as million after million Jewish people were allegedly exterminated?


The reason?

It never happened.

.
No.

The reason had been known since before the Holocaust proper began -- you would know, too, if your posts ddin't show you to be so to-the-bone ignorant of the history you are so rabid to deny.

It involved laws that required Jews trying to emigrate to abandon everything they owned when they left -- and later leaving itself was forbidden.

Rational beings would understand the disconnect between this and deniers' claims that it was all about deportation (to areas in which German law did not apply, meaning they had no authority to throw out their own citizens).

Seriously, dude: learn a little bit of history before you continue to post such nonsense.

That you will post nonsense is a given, but at least you will be able to post remotely plausible nonsense rather than mindlessly parroting the crap you have been spoon fed.
.

 

[Clayton Moore]

.
No.

The reason had been known since before the Holocaust proper began -- you would know, too, if your posts ddin't show you to be so to-the-bone ignorant of the history you are so rabid to deny.

It involved laws that required Jews trying to emigrate to abandon everything they owned when they left -- and later leaving itself was forbidden.

Rational beings would understand the disconnect between this and deniers' claims that it was all about deportation (to areas in which German law did not apply, meaning they had no authority to throw out their own citizens).

Seriously, dude: learn a little bit of history before you continue to post such nonsense.

That you will post nonsense is a given, but at least you will be able to post remotely plausible nonsense rather than mindlessly parroting the crap you have been spoon fed.
.

Way to avoid the question. Even forest animals get it that their forest is on fire and it's time to make tracks.

Were the Jewish people the most educated religious group of the day or not?

 

[SanityGap]

Way to avoid the question. Even forest animals get it that their forest is on fire and it's time to make tracks.

Were the Jewish people the most educated religious group of the day or not?

Educated? Probably.
Armed to the teeth? Not so much.
Not a difficult concept.

 

[Clayton Moore]

Educated? Probably.

If you were a Jewish person and you know that a million Jewish people who went to the camps were killed wouldn't you do anything to get out of Dodge(Europe)?

And don't say they would not have known.

 

[LemmyCaution]

Jews remained citizens and there wasn't a plan to exterminate ALL of them. I learn something new everyday.

I must add, for Dogzilla's benefit, that my posting of Joachim Neander's explanation of categories of citizenship in the Reich was not meant to be my approval of Neander's conclusions.

The intention of my post was to show some of the complexity of what Dogzilla so flippantly tosses aside and to provoke discussion, not further flippancy, which was Dogzilla's unfortunate response.

In fact, I do object to two important conclusions drawn by Neander. First, Neander concluded that the second-class citizenship status prescribed for Jews "had very little influence on everyday life in the Reich." Rather, I think, this status was one piece of a deluge of laws, regulations, and actions drawing a social-political map for Germany - a map in which Jews were stigmatized and isolated by being defined as having less racial value than members of the national community, the concept of the national community taking precedence over formal citizenship in this instance. These exclusions, insults, and acts of denigration, of which the citizenship law was one part, had great influence on daily life - and one's future - in the Reich.

Second, Neander further minimized the importance of the Nazi legislation when he wrote that "legal discrimination against a subset of the Staatsangehörigen was not a Nazi invention"; while this is true, the way in which the laws, policies, and actions taken by the Nazis characterized and defined Jews was different from previous exclusions from full political rights - in that Jews were defined as having negative racial worth, as an existential threat to the national community, and as a problem to be solved.

In my view, Neander's explanation, while it was informative on the formal legal aspects of Reich citizenship, missed the point entirely on the Nazi program to consign German Jews to what one commentator has called "social death" and to promote a racial viewpoint, with Jews at the bottom of the racial ladder, among the German people, promising "Aryans" the privilege of membership in a national community opposed to Jews and other groups deemed to have less racial worth.

 

[LemmyCaution]

.
No.

The reason had been known since before the Holocaust proper began -- you would know, too, if your posts ddin't show you to be so to-the-bone ignorant of the history you are so rabid to deny.

It involved laws that required Jews trying to emigrate to abandon everything they owned when they left -- and later leaving itself was forbidden.

Rational beings would understand the disconnect between this and deniers' claims that it was all about deportation (to areas in which German law did not apply, meaning they had no authority to throw out their own citizens).

Seriously, dude: learn a little bit of history before you continue to post such nonsense.

That you will post nonsense is a given, but at least you will be able to post remotely plausible nonsense rather than mindlessly parroting the crap you have been spoon fed.
.

I had wanted to expand a bit on my comment, but TSR has added just what I intended.

Clayton packed two fallacies into one post: first, that no one has written on why Jews were unable to escape the Nazis; second, many Jews did so before those remaining were prevented by policy and force from doing so.

IIRC nearly 400,000 Jews emigrated from Germany and Austria before the Nazis attacked Poland - and 10s of 1000s more escaped, as TSR has said, giving up their life's earnings and wealth to do so, before fall 1941. Most of this exodus came before the mass exterminations began. On 23 October 1941, the same month in which the Nazis began deporting Jews from the Reich and Protectorate, Gestapo Muller issued this order, putting an end to Jewish emigration on any meaningful scale:

Re: Emigration of Jews

Reference: none

The Reichsfuehrer SS and Chief of the German Police has decreed that the emigration of Jews is to be prevented, taking effect immediately. (Evacuation Aktionen will remain unaffected.)

I request that the internal German Authorities concerned in the area of service there may be informed of this order.

Permission for the emigration of individual Jews can only be approved in single very special cases; for instance, in the event of a genuine interest on the part of the Reich, and then only after a prior decision has been obtained from the Reich Security Main Office.

signed Mueller

That said, 100s of 1000s of Jews fled the rapid advance of the Wehrmacht into the USSR, with many of those who had time escaping eastward. Once Jews were in areas controlled by the Nazis, their chance of escape was negligible - due to Nazi policy first and foremost, but also because of immigration quotas, logistical problems, and divisions over refugee and immigration matters amongst the Allies.

 

[Clayton Moore]

I had wanted to expand a bit on my comment, but TSR has added just what I intended.

Clayton packed two fallacies into one post: first, that no one has written on why Jews were unable to escape the Nazis; second, many Jews did so before those remaining were prevented by policy and force from doing so.

IIRC nearly 400,000 Jews emigrated from Germany and Austria before the Nazis attacked Poland - and 10s of 1000s more escaped, as TSR has said, giving up their life's earnings and wealth to do so, before fall 1941. Most of this exodus came before the mass exterminations began. On 23 October 1941, the same month in which the Nazis began deporting Jews from the Reich and Protectorate, Gestapo Muller issued this order, putting an end to Jewish emigration on any meaningful scale: That said, 100s of 1000s of Jews fled the rapid advance of the Wehrmacht into the USSR, with many of those who had time escaping eastward. Once Jews were in areas controlled by the Nazis, their chance of escape was negligible - due to Nazi policy first and foremost, but also because of immigration quotas, logistical problems, and divisions over refugee and immigration matters amongst the Allies.

You're avoiding the question.


If you were a Jewish person, of 2 to 4 million Jewish people, and you know that a million Jewish people who went to the camps were killed wouldn't you do anything to get out of Dodge(Europe)?

And don't say they would not have known.

 

[A'isha]

You're avoiding the question.

No, he directly answered your question.

 

[tsig]

What in the world does the anti-Jewish legislation and persecution of the German Jews in 1933 have to do - other than in an antisemitic fantasy world - with the imaginary Jew sabotaging the German war effort in the east in 1944? I will grant you that the Germans were killing Jews because they believed many untrue things about them. I am not sure what your making this point has to do with the argument you usually make that the killings did not occur.

In their effort to absolve the Nazis of the holocaust they have to resort to the same sort of demonizing of the Jew that the Nazis used to justify the holocaust in the first place.

(evil Jews lurking about in dark places to sabotage the efforts of the pure Aryan race.)

 

[TSR]

Way to avoid the question. Even forest animals get it that their forest is on fire and it's time to make tracks.

.
No, it directly addressed your "question".

If those forest animals then found fine-mesh fences too high to jump over, with armed men on the other side specifically stationed there to prevent their leaving, then what?
.

Were the Jewish people the most educated religious group of the day or not?

.
What has this got to do with the very real barriers which were in place to prevent Jews from "getting"? In what way is that consistent with a policy of encouraging them to "get"?

It looks very like *you're* the one avoiding questions...
.

 

[tsig]

If you want to say the Jews were killed at these camps, you need to explain what happened to them.

They died.

 

[LemmyCaution]

I directly answered Clayton's question, as did TSR.

Now Clayton asks what I would do if I had been a Jew in an area under Nazi control: "If you were a Jewish person, of 2 to 4 million Jewish people, and you know that a million Jewish people who went to the camps were killed wouldn't you do anything to get out of Dodge(Europe)?"

I need a clearer question or some context to be able to answer this, because contrary to Clayton's thinking, Jews were not all the same and did not react all the same. Their responses to persecution varied, depending on many different factors.

Clayton needs to give the following context:

- Where do I live? In what size community?
- What language(s) do I speak?
- What month/year is it?
- How old am I?
- Am I male or female?
- What have been my education and work experience?
- Do I live with/near close family?
- Do I have living with me young children? Elderly parents?
- Am I a member of a Jewish organization? If so, which one?
- Am I religiously oriented or more secular?
- Is where I live under German control? If so, how long? If not, how close is it to falling to the Germans?
- What kind of work do I do, if any - and relatively how bad/good is it?
- What is the leadership of my particular community saying to do?
- Do some community leaders advocate resistance?
- Do I have access to arms?
- Are there partisan groups nearby?
- How close is the Red Army? Allied forces?
- Are there Jewish Gestapo living in my community spreading confusion?
- How imminent, and clear, is the threat?
- What have I personally witnessed as opposed to heard about?
- What information do I have and how firm is it?

And so on.