• Quick note - the problem with Youtube videos not embedding on the forum appears to have been fixed, thanks to ZiprHead. If you do still see problems let me know.

General Holocaust Denial Discussion Part II

Status
Not open for further replies.
Don't flatter yourself. I'm not talking about heroism. I'm talking about people who have allegedly witnessed atrocities within an organized camp environment. Supposedly while participating in a daily routine.

atrocities
daily routine

atrocities
daily routine

atrocities
daily routine

atrocities
daily routine

days weeks months

Knowing that they could be next would make any person involved in a camp's daily routine a possible time bomb.
A camps daily routine couldn't continue. The guards and staff couldn't trust the inmates. Period.

Visit a prison.

:dl:
 
Don't flatter yourself. I'm not talking about heroism. I'm talking about people who have allegedly witnessed atrocities within an organized camp environment. Supposedly while participating in a daily routine.

atrocities
daily routine

atrocities
daily routine

atrocities
daily routine

atrocities
daily routine

days weeks months

Knowing that they could be next would make any person involved in a camp's daily routine a possible time bomb.
A camps daily routine couldn't continue. The guards and staff couldn't trust the inmates. Period.
You should really read about the death camps sometime, Clayton. It is very interesting material, enlightening in many ways. If you did this, you'd learn how long - in hours, not days weeks months - the typical deportee to an AR camp lasted there. You'd learn under what conditions the very few Jewish workers in these camps were held and what functions they served. You'd learn about the system of Kapos and how it was made to work for the Germans. You'd learn about Ukrainian guards as well as German staff. You'd learn how the camp authorities were organized and how they ran the camp. You'd learn what kinds of punishments were given those kept alive as workers. You'd learn the different ways Jews brought to AR camps met their fates. You'd find out how prisoners were brought to the camps, from where, and what they endured during transit. You'd learn about the killing process, from A to Z, that took place in the camps. You'd learn how the small groups of working prisoners were fed, about the roll calls, what barracks were like, how much drinking water they had, what kind of clothes they wore, and what they thought of the people who held them in the camps.

Now, if you were to read about this and then still to deny that it happened, it might be possible to have a discussion with you. As it is, you offer irrelevant and confused little flashes of total ignorance - so many and so ill-informed that one does wonder why you are here and what you are trying to prove. Even deniers have expressed embarrassment at your antics - and that is astonishing, because deniers themselves show scarcely any shame in how they treat sources and make arguments.
 
Last edited:
Since Nazi policy towards the Jews involved sending a minority of Jews to KZs as forced labourers since at the latest, 26 January 1942, then the two policies were intimately linked from that date onwards.

There would still be a clear distinction between Jewish and non-Jewish forced laborers if the intent was working the Jews to death while merely extracting as much labor from the non-Jewish forced laborers. For example, Jewish workers would be provided with inferior accommodations, food, medical treatment, etc. compared to the non-Jewish workers or maybe they would be forced to work longer hours or perform more strenuous or more dangerous tasks. The policies might be intimately linked but there would be evidence of disparate treatment of two classes of forced laborers--Jews and non-Jews--if they were indeed treated differently.


You think wrong. In the short term, immediate extermination was the fate of Jews who were unfit for work. Jews able to work would drop dead from 'natural causes' as spelled out in the Wannsee protocol, a document which is referenced by pretty much every historian. The Wannsee protocol states that once the able bodied Jews have been reduced in this way, then the remnant will be finished off ('correspondingly handled') as they would be the seeds of a biological revival.

But immediate extermination was not the fate of Jews who were unfit for work. The minutes of the conference are themselves clear about establishing an old age ghetto for Jews at Theresienstadt. Wounded and/or decorated WWI veterans were also exempted from extermination. There was also much discussion about what to do with Jews in mixed marriages and the progeny of such marriages. What we don't see in the minutes is anybody advocating a "Kill 'em all let Dog sort 'em out" policy even after retrofitting the document with euphemistic sinister intent.

And keeping some of them alive who can work is an anomaly that contradicts a 'kill 'em all eventually' policy because at the time of the conference (early 1942) there weren't pressing labor needs that couldn't be solved by non-Jewish workers in the occupied countries.


Therefore, the "destruction of the Jewish race" or "extirpation of the Jews" would be carried out by a combination of extermination (as in immediate killing) and indirect decimation.

Letting Jews live until they simply die of old age isn't an extermination policy.


No. Historians recognise that the 'destruction of the Jewish race' could be carried out by a variety of means. Discussion of the Final Solution was implicitly genocidal from the summer of 1940 onwards. The Madagascar Plan was one step towards this since the plan would clearly have resulted in a massive loss of life; the so-called Siberia Plan which was the next substitute implied deporting all the Jews deep into the east with nary a care for whether they survived or not.

A few brain-dead thinkers and writers have called the Madagascar plan clear evidence of the Nazi plan to exterminate the Jews because, I guess, Madagascar didn't have broad expanses of planned communities with comfortable spacious condominiums restaurants, golf courses, and plenty of trendy shopping districts that were uninhabited and available for a flood of European Jews to move into in the 1940s. Maybe there weren't any five star resorts in Madagascar in the 1940s but planning to send Jews to live there cannot be seen as a diabolical plot to kill them all. The land was more hospitable than Palestine at the same time and you don't hear Jews whining about being forced to live there. What makes the Madagascar plan unforgivably vile is that dumping millions of European Jews there over such a short period of time would have destroyed the delicate and unique ecosystem that exists on that island.

But I digress. An "implicitly genocidal" plan like Madagascar or even Siberia isn't good enough. The treatment of the Cherokee Nation by the state of Georgia was "implicitly genocidal" but nobody says it was an extermination plan. The British, Dutch, and French actions against the native populations in North America; the Spanish and Portuguese in South America, the British in Australia--everytime and everywhere Europeans made contact with non-Europeans, they carried out "implicitly genocidal" policies. And then there's the Jewish settler's in Palestine and of course Potsdam.

If you want to claim the holocaust was a unique crime of unparalleled evil that involved the intentional physical extermination of all the Jews in Europe, "implicitly genocidal" actions that have happened to a wide variety of people throughout history won't cut it.


Twisting my words again. Had the Nazis dispensed with 300,000 to half a million Jewish forced labourers, because their ideological zeal was so powerful that no Jewish forced labour at all was permitted, then the war economy would not have collapsed, since Jews formed a numerical minority of the total workforce. The war economy would have suffered, yes, but it would not have collapsed.

I concede that point. The economy would have suffered but it wouldn't have collapsed completely if Jews had been completely removed. But it still begs the question of why keep any Jews around at all when there are plenty of non-Jews who could do the work just as well? It's not as if the Nazis considered the Jews to be most productive people in the world. If their ideological zeal wasn't so powerful that no Jewish forced labor was allowed, what does it say about their ideological zeal to physically exterminate all the Jews?


I already explained this. The SS had economic and construction plans which were not oriented towards the immediate war effort, eg building vast concentration camp complexes like Auschwitz to aid in the Germanisation project of the General Plan East. To make their long-term plans 'pay' they had to farm out labourers to actual war production. Thus Himmler invited firms like IG Farben to Auschwitz.

Since the labour market was entirely directed by this point and there was a shortage of labour, and since 'ordinary' foreign workers and Soviet POWs were being used to replace German men called up to replace the heavy losses in Barbarossa, Himmler and the SS turned to Jews, telling Gluecks on 26 January 1942 to prepare the concentration camps for the arrival of 150,000 Jews. Now that quota is obviously way less than the 11 million Jews (wrongly) counted in Europe in the Wannsee protocol, and way less than the 9-10 million that were in Europe at the time.

Because the SS were also in charge of Jewish policy by this time, turning to Jews as a reserve army of labour made perfect sense, as they could kill two birds with one stone. Thus the elegance of selection on the ramp at Auschwitz.

You just keep repeating yourself. You said earlier that there were plenty of non-Jewish workers in the occupied territory to satisfy the labor needs of Nazi Germany. You said that the labor shortages didn't become critical until 1944 when German losses couldn't be replaced by foreign workers because the occupied territories were lost.

So, prior to 1944, why were some Jews selected on the ramp to work and others were selected to die when the policy was to kill them all? A policy of keeping Jews alive only temporarily would make sense if their labor was necessary. But it wasn't. It would make sense if Jews were considered to be stronger and better able to work under harsh conditions than non-Jews. But the Nazis considered Jews weak and lazy. It would make sense if the Jews possessed certain skills that were necessary but uncommon among the non-Jews. But skill-sets weren't taken into consideration on the ramp. Jews were selected for work based upon an instant assessment of their physical prowess made by an SS doctor (nearly always Mengele) and their ability to perform menial labor.

Jews being selected on the ramp to work in 1944 might make sense but what were the Nazis doing with all those Jews prior to 1944 but after the decision had been made to completely exterminate of all the Jews in Europe?


The SS could do this because the Jews had been uprooted from their jobs and livelihoods in France, Belgium, the Netherlands etc, and were now deported. Once they were deported, they weren't coming back, but they were now at the disposal of the SS to dispose of how they wished. Most were killed on arrival, but a minority were retained for work, and then dropped dead from harsh conditions. In the first phase of deportations from the Netherlands to Auschwitz, 40,000 or so Jews were transported to the camp, and just 85 survived.

Your scenario becomes more befuddled as you go along. When had Jews been uprooted from their jobs and livelihoods in France, Belgium and the Netherlands and been deported? Prior to 1944? So they were sitting around being housed and fed by people who planned on killing them all since 1941/1942? Or were they allowed to remain at their jobs and earn their livelihood until 1944 even though the Nazis had planned to kill them all since 1941/1942?


Most were; see the Dutch example. Others however were the subject of battles between different factions of the Nazi regime. Gauleiter Greiser wanted the 'useless' Jews dead before there was even a firm pan-European decision. So he negotiated with Himmler to kill 100,000 unfit Jews in the Warthegau. Thus, Chelmno. The quota was exceeded so that by the autumn of 1942, some 145,000 were killed. But 95,000 remained, employed in the local war economy and profiting the civil authorities in the Warthegau. Himmler wanted to deport the rest, but Greiser kept saying 'no' regarding the Lodz ghetto until spring 1944.

In the summer of 1943, however, Himmler engineered the liquidation of a series of work camps in the Warthegau, whose inmates were sent to Auschwitz. This killed two birds with one stone again, since Himmler got to kill more Jews and he also got to reinforce the Auschwitz workforce with those selected for work, which was important because Auschwitz had become a very big camp complex with multiple functions.

Policy in the Warthegau was different to policy in Germany itself. There, the Wehrmacht got an exemption for Jews working in armaments factories in October 1941. I.e. before any general decision to exterminate. Hitler decided in September 1942 that these Jews would be replaced by Poles and Russians, and deported. Himmler then organised their deportation in February-March 1943, once they could be replaced, and sent them to Auschwitz, again killing two birds with one stone, since Monowitz really needed more workers, but the majority of the deportees were still killed.

Your description of how Jewish labor was exploited is consistent with a policy of exploiting Jewish labor. A policy of killing all the Jews who were unfit for work isn't consistent with an old-age ghetto at Theresienstadt. A policy of wanting to kill all the Jews isn't consistent with keeping some of them alive to work unless their labor was absolutely critical--which it wasn't. At the end of the war, food shortages in the camps were reaching crisis proportions. Non-Jews and Jews were dropping like flies. Shifting resources to the non-Jews would've helped alleviate some of the problems while simultaneously accelerating the physical extermination of all the Jews.

If there was a firm policy of physical extermination the actual fate of the Jews in Europe doesn't reflect that.


I did answer the question. You just don't want to give up your strawmen, which have been pointed out twice now. Nazi policy was to bring about the destruction of the Jewish race by a combination of immediate extermination and the exploitation of a minority for forced labour until they dropped dead. The Wannsee protocol indicates that the eventual fate for the survivors of forced labour would be death. The Wannsee conference took place at a time when the Nazis still had hopes of winning the war. It is generally agreed that had the Nazis won the war, that they would have dispensed with Jewish forced labour and killed the survivors. Because they didn't win the war and because of the changing circumstances in the war economy and occupied territories in 1943-45, Jews selected for forced labour now had a chance of surviving the war entirely. Which is what happened.

You say that the physical extermination of all the Jews in Europe is a strawman that I don't want to give up. I say it's a central pillar of the holocaust. What you have described and what in fact actually happened to the Jews cannot be said to be evidence for a plan for the physical extermination of all the Jews in Europe. I'm happy to drop it. Since you've already said that six million isn't a precise number, that leaves only the gas chambers that are in dispute.

Planning to enslave the Jews for forced labor until they dropped dead could be said to be a plan to kill them all if measures were taken to hasten their demise while on the job. But there isn't any documentary evidence of this of which I am aware. Sterilizing all the Jews who were kept alive to work could be seen as a plan to eventually kill the Jews but even that didn't happen. You keep pretending to answer the question but you haven't done so.


I'm right and TSR is wrong, but the principle is similar. There is copious documentation on the deportation of 437,000 Jews from Hungary from May to July 1944 to Auschwitz. There is copious documentation on the fate of circa 110,000 Hungarian Jews selected for labour out of the 437,000 from May to July 1944 at Auschwitz, and sent to other camps. There is no documentation and indeed, no evidence whatsoever, indicating the survival of the balance (327,000 Jews) or their transport anywhere else. All the evidence points to their being murdered at Auschwitz, this evidence including contemporary documents of various provenance, but not bodycount reports from the SS, since those were destroyed, as indeed were most of the 'normal' camp records for 1944. The copious documents for the survival of 110,000 Jews are generally found elsewhere, eg in the records of Mauthausen or wherever.

Where was the documentation on the deportation of 437,000 Jews from Hungary found? Are there records of their arrival at Auschwitz that were found at Auschwitz? Are the 110,000 who were selected and sent to other camps considered durchgangjuden?
 
This is simply untrue.

Prisoners in the camp received meals three times a day: morning, noon, and evening. Factors influencing the nutritional value of the food included the official nutritional norms in the Nazi concentration camps. In practice, Auschwitz prisoners with less physically demanding labor assignments received approximately 1,300 calories per day, while those engaged in hard labor received approximately 1,700. After several weeks on such starvation rations in the camp, most prisoners began to experience organic deterioration that led to the so-called "Muzulman" state, extreme physical exhaustion that ended in death.

http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Holocaust/auconditions.html

Only 1,300 calories a day? That's not even 37% more than the 950 calories per day the Germans were getting in the American zone in July 1945 (Decision in Germany, Lucas Clay, page 264).
 
First Hand Withness Hugo Gryn

http://education.hmd.org.uk/case-studies/hugo-gryn/read

http://www.history.co.uk/explore-hi...tml?bctid=68642738001&Separating-at-Auschwitz

Hugo left Berehovo and came to the UK in 1946 where he continued his education, became proficient in English and studied hard. He then went to Cincinnati in the U.S.A. where he became a rabbi, returning to London to become a leading figure in the British Jewish community and a regular contributor on BBC programmes such as The Moral Maze. In 1978, shocked by the growth of Holocaust denial, he began to speak in public about his experiences. He hid nothing, even recalling how he became involved when prisoners killed a sadistic camp guard. To challenge denial he devoted a whole year of his life to bearing witness. He wrote “Time is short and the task is urgent. Evil is real. So is good. There is a choice.”

I hear there was a Methodist minister involved in the lynching of Leo Frank. I'm glad vigilante justice isn't confined to only Christian men of the cloth.
 
There would still be a clear distinction between Jewish and non-Jewish forced laborers if the intent was working the Jews to death while merely extracting as much labor from the non-Jewish forced laborers. For example, Jewish workers would be provided with inferior accommodations, food, medical treatment, etc. compared to the non-Jewish workers or maybe they would be forced to work longer hours or perform more strenuous or more dangerous tasks. The policies might be intimately linked but there would be evidence of disparate treatment of two classes of forced laborers--Jews and non-Jews--if they were indeed treated differently.

None of what you write necessarily follows from what I wrote.

From Wannsee onwards, a minority of Jews were to be put to forced labour and this was expected to result in the deaths of a large number of the Jews. This is indeed what happened in many forced labour camps for Jews, so-called Zwangsarbeitslager fuer Juden (ZALs), also known as Judenlager or Julags. Some of the worst examples were the ZAL network along Durchgangsstrasse IV in Galicia and Ukraine, which were overseen by the SS and saw extremely harsh treatment resulting in a high turnover of labourers. The DG IV camps were liquidated in the summer of 1943 - literally. As in the inmates were shot.

Less than a week after Wannsee, Himmler ordered Gluecks to prepare for the arrival of 150,000 Jews in the KZ system. This meant, as became clear from March 1942, Auschwitz and Majdanek, both camps which held non-Jewish prisoners. Jews had already been treated worse in KZs since 1933, but this was as much to do with the ideological zeal of the SS as anything planned.

KZ accommodation, food and medical treatment were already pretty poor, and in Auschwitz and Majdanek during 1942 they were staggeringly worse than in the older KZs of the Reich. Therefore the few Jews interned in 'ordinary' KZs were transferred to Auschwitz, since that camp was placed on a different status de facto. The registered death rate for both Jews and non-Jews in Auschwitz and Majdanek was noticeably higher, but was proportionately worse for Jews for a variety of reasons. In both cases, Jews were also singled out for selections which became a key marker distinguishing their fate from that of non-Jews, especially at Auschwitz. During 1942, SS doctors and medical orderlies developed a practice of bumping off weakened prisoners in the hospitals at Auschwitz using phenol injections. This was applied indiscriminately, and it then ended in March 1943. However, selections of weakened Jews continued.

In the winter of 1943, the new Auschwitz commandant Liebehenschel ended a number of brutal practices which had been carried out under Hoess and by the political department director Grabner. He promised better treatment, in keeping with the overall direction of SS policy in the KZ system by this time, since prisoners were much more important by then as labourers. But selections of weakened Jews continued even after the 'new regime' was introduced. They continued through 1944, until they were stopped in the autumn of 1944 at the behest of higher SS authorities.

Thus, there is clear evidence of a discriminatory treatment of Jews in the KZs of Auschwitz and Majdanek to which they were sent during 1942-spring 1944, before the major volte-face of the Hungarian Action brought Jews back into the 'ordinary' camps in Germany and Austria. But even after May 1944, there continued to be various forms of differential treatment, which included selecting weakened Jewish prisoners to be returned to Auschwitz for liquidation. Only in the autumn of 1944 were Jews given the same access to certain medical procedures, around the same time as the Final Solution was regarded as formally over.

But immediate extermination was not the fate of Jews who were unfit for work. The minutes of the conference are themselves clear about establishing an old age ghetto for Jews at Theresienstadt. Wounded and/or decorated WWI veterans were also exempted from extermination. There was also much discussion about what to do with Jews in mixed marriages and the progeny of such marriages. What we don't see in the minutes is anybody advocating a "Kill 'em all let Dog sort 'em out" policy even after retrofitting the document with euphemistic sinister intent.

(sigh) We went over this a few weeks ago. You are trying to use an exemption from being subjected to the Final Solution to dispute the meaning of the Final Solution. Jews sent to Theresienstadt belonged to a variety of privileged classes of German and Austrian Jews; these privileges were not extended to Jews of other European nations, who were subjected to deportation to Auschwitz or another camp in Poland, and were selected on arrival into unfit and able-bodied groups, with the unfit being killed immediately.

And keeping some of them alive who can work is an anomaly that contradicts a 'kill 'em all eventually' policy because at the time of the conference (early 1942) there weren't pressing labor needs that couldn't be solved by non-Jewish workers in the occupied countries.

Since the 'kill 'em all eventually' policy was outlined at Wannsee, the entire set up was pretty clear from January 1942 onwards. I already explained why the SS wanted to use Jewish forced labour.

Letting Jews live until they simply die of old age isn't an extermination policy.

The Theresienstadt Jews were meant to be exempted from the Final Solution.

A few brain-dead thinkers and writers have called the Madagascar plan clear evidence of the Nazi plan to exterminate the Jews because, I guess, Madagascar didn't have broad expanses of planned communities with comfortable spacious condominiums restaurants, golf courses, and plenty of trendy shopping districts that were uninhabited and available for a flood of European Jews to move into in the 1940s. Maybe there weren't any five star resorts in Madagascar in the 1940s but planning to send Jews to live there cannot be seen as a diabolical plot to kill them all. The land was more hospitable than Palestine at the same time and you don't hear Jews whining about being forced to live there. What makes the Madagascar plan unforgivably vile is that dumping millions of European Jews there over such a short period of time would have destroyed the delicate and unique ecosystem that exists on that island.

But I digress. An "implicitly genocidal" plan like Madagascar or even Siberia isn't good enough.

(Sigh) Perhaps unsurprisingly, you rather missed the point of my noting the fact that there were prior plans that would have resulted in the genocide of European Jews without resorting to immediate extermination. The point, which you clearly don't understand, is that one can bring about the extinction of large numbers of people through deportation, forced marches, harsh conditions, famine and starvation.

Some of those methods were already at work in Poland from 1939-41, in places such as the Warsaw and Lodz ghetto, and being applauded by various Nazis for decimating the Jewish population of Poland, who were ultimately to be disposed of in some fashion, with the Nazis evidently not caring very much what happened to the Jews.

The same methods resulted in the mass starvation of more than 2 million Soviet POWs in the winter of 1941-2, and were enacted against the backdrop of quite bloodthirsty economic planning which projected the demise of 20-30 million people in the Soviet Union as a result of the Nazi invasion. The "Hunger Plan", which was quite real and has a fair old paper trail to explain it, meant that any plan to deport the Jews of Europe to "Siberia" was a plan to bring about the destruction of the Jewish race in Europe through expulsion, forced marches and starvation.

Subsequent Nazi planning for the colonisation of the occupied Soviet Union, the General Plan East, also proceeded on the basis of a population reduction of 20-30 million people.

Nothing like these plans have ever been contemplated by another state in human history. The scale of them dwarfs what was actually carried out because they could not be enacted under wartime conditions. The modified variant that was actually enacted killed 2 million Soviet POWs and more than a million Soviet civilians through famine, and it provided a further justification for murdering 1 million Soviet Jews outright.

It also meant that further deportation planning for the Final Solution from mid-1941 onwards was understood as part of the wider racial and economic planning of the Nazi regime. That is why Eberhard Wetzel of the Eastern Ministry noted in the spring that:

An evacuation of the Jews also mentioned in the plan is no longer necessary due to the solution of the Jewish question. An eventual transfer of the Jews still remaining after the end of this war to forced labour camps in the northern Russian and Siberian territory is no "evacuation". Of the alien peoples to be considered for evacuation there thus remain to be discussed only the Poles, Western Ukrainians and White Ruthenians.

The same memo notes that "It should be clear that one cannot solve the Polish question by liquidating the Poles like the Jews".

What documents like this indicate is that up to the start of 1942, serious thought was given by the Nazis to simply deporting all the Jews 'to the east' and dumping them in northern Russia (by Murmansk) or across the Urals in Siberia. This could only have been done if the Soviet Union had collapsed entirely and the Nazis had rolled all the way up to the Urals as originally planned.

The treatment of the Cherokee Nation by the state of Georgia was "implicitly genocidal" but nobody says it was an extermination plan. The British, Dutch, and French actions against the native populations in North America; the Spanish and Portuguese in South America, the British in Australia--everytime and everywhere Europeans made contact with non-Europeans, they carried out "implicitly genocidal" policies. And then there's the Jewish settler's in Palestine and of course Potsdam.

You are getting yourself tied in semantic and conceptual knots here. Many of the examples you cite are commonly regarded as examples of genocide. The language and rhetoric which accompanied them was also genocidal, 18th Century settlers repeatedly talked about 'extirpating' aboriginals and Native Americans. The idea of destroying another people was clearly on the cards.

The destruction of a people does not need to be brought about by 'immediate extermination'. So when Nazis talked about 'die Vernichtung der juedischen Rasse im Europa' they were referring to a macro-process of destruction that did not have to be carried out by any specific means. As long as the Jewish race was destroyed, it did not matter how this was done. Nazi rhetoric referring to destruction goes back to 1939 at the latest, and keeps on going after January 1942.

By early 1942, the Final Solution of the Jewish Question meant the Vernichtung or Ausrottung of the Jewish race in Europe through a combination of methods, some short-term and some medium term. The plan was to deport Jews other than a few exempted categories to the 'east' where they would be divided into the unfit and the able-bodied. The unfit would be killed and the able-bodied would be put to forced labour and decimated over time. That was very clearly what they intended and was what they enacted from the spring of 1942 onwards, coalescing by July 1942 into a multi-camp program, symbolised by selection on arrival at Auschwitz.

If you want to claim the holocaust was a unique crime of unparalleled evil

Excuse me, where have I ever said that? Please quote me saying anything along these lines.

that involved the intentional physical extermination of all the Jews in Europe, "implicitly genocidal" actions that have happened to a wide variety of people throughout history won't cut it.

Since I don't regard the Holocaust as uniquely unique, then please find someone else who might care about your strawman.

I am discussing the Holocaust as it actually happened, a Nazi policy of mass murder and maltreatment towards the Jews of Europe which saw about 2.6 million killed in death camps or en route, along with 2 million shot and 700,000 or so dying in ghettos and concentration camps.

I concede that point. The economy would have suffered but it wouldn't have collapsed completely if Jews had been completely removed. But it still begs the question of why keep any Jews around at all when there are plenty of non-Jews who could do the work just as well? It's not as if the Nazis considered the Jews to be most productive people in the world. If their ideological zeal wasn't so powerful that no Jewish forced labor was allowed, what does it say about their ideological zeal to physically exterminate all the Jews?

Actually, Nazi antisemitism very much got off on the idea of putting 'workshy' Jews to work in degrading physical labour. Their ideological zeal helps explain why they might enjoy keeping some Jews around to torment.

But mostly, your inability to understand the historical record is simply inane. "The Nazis" were not a homogeneous group; some Nazi politicians were more pragmatic than others. We can identify hardcore ideologues among them, people like Himmler and Bormann, people who tended to push for maximum destruction, as well as figures who were not quite as deranged, such as Gauleiter Greiser and Hans Frank.

The latter two politicians ruled over territories where the Jews formed a major part of the existing industrial, artisanal and commercial workforce. From 1939 onwards, Nazi policies had reduced Jewish economic participation drastically, and also created ever larger groups of 'surplus' populations by throwing Jewish shop-keepers out of work, impoverishing them and making them more and more useless due to malnutrition and poverty. But dispensing overnight with all Jews in Poland was too radical even for the Nazis. Thus, in the Government-General, the Nazis deported and killed about 80% of the Jewish population in the space of a year, sparing only 20%.

In the same region, there were other parts of the Nazi state that were not as bound to Nazi ideological dogma as the Party or SS. Like the Wehrmacht. It is pretty well documented that the Wehrmacht wanted to keep Jewish forced labourers in Poland, and went so far as to protest the rapidity of the deportations because of the economic disruption they caused. This resulted in the general in question being sacked, but it also meant that Himmler and the SS reiterated their acceptance that some Jews would be kept alive for a time, as long as they were in camps under SS control and not wandering around. So for the next year or so, the SS progressively removed all the remaining ghettos and work camps into their KZs or killed them if they were surplus to requirements.

Evidently, the Nazis found it perfectly acceptable to have something of a transition. I really don't get why this is so hard for you to understand.

You just keep repeating yourself. You said earlier that there were plenty of non-Jewish workers in the occupied territory to satisfy the labor needs of Nazi Germany. You said that the labor shortages didn't become critical until 1944 when German losses couldn't be replaced by foreign workers because the occupied territories were lost.

So, prior to 1944, why were some Jews selected on the ramp to work and others were selected to die when the policy was to kill them all?

I keep repeating myself because you keep on failing to understand what is perfectly comprehensible to an undergraduate.

Firstly, the policy was clearly not to 'kill them all' immediately. Please desist from this strawman forthwith.

Secondly, I have explained several times now that the SS wanted to use Jewish labour for *its* purposes. During 1942 and 1943, one part of the SS, the RSHA, organised the deportation of fewer than half a million Jews to Auschwitz. Another part of the SS, the WVHA, oversaw the murder of those deemed unfit and the exploitation of the able-bodied, in conditions which saw a huge turnover of the camp population. Think of Auschwitz as a free port, treaty port or extraterritorial space under the control of the SS alone. Think of the Auschwitz inmates as people in limbo. Auschwitz inmates were at the disposal of the SS to do with as they pleased, whether that was helping with agricultural experiments, building the camp and barracks for the SS, and working for industrial firms who had concessions in the treaty port that had been negotiated by the SS.

All this came about because a promised transfer of 300,000 Soviet POWs fell through, as they were all dead or badly needed on the labour market outside the Auschwitz limbo. It is thus perfectly clear why Himmler decided to use Jews in Auschwitz for work, because he couldn't get any other easily available source of labour. The only alternative would have been a massive program of arresting suspected resistance fighters across Europe, which would have been much more time-consuming and also brought the SS into conflict with other agencies, since arresting 150,000 inhabitants of Warsaw overnight would remove workers from existing factories.

Thirdly, all this has to be seen in time and space across the whole of Europe. As of January 1942, Soviet POWs were not being handed over to the SS as freebie workers. They were going to Germany and Austria to work in the war economy. Ukrainian civilians were being sucked out of Ukraine to work in the fields and factories in Germany and Austria. German and Austrian Jews were a small minority and did not matter much economically, but some Jewish armaments workers were exempted until early 1943 because of the pressure of the Wehrmacht. Once again, we are back to the fact that the Nazi regime was not homogeneous and was deeply factionalised.

The situation in western Europe was similar. Let us take France as an example. French civilians began to be deported in larger numbers to Germany for work at the precise same time as the Final Solution began. French Jews couldn't be deported to Berlin or Hannover or Munich because this would violate Nazi racial expectations and would not bring about any kind of solution. French Jews were also not a huge economic factor in France due to the small size of the population (300,000 vs 40 million), and thus could be rounded up and deported with few impediments from economic agencies. Thus, the deportation of French Jews did not cause massive economic damage to the occupied economy of France (which was suffering far more from German occupation costs and the ensuing inflation, along with shortages of raw materials). So there was no countervailing force to stop the deportations or slow them down for really significant portions of the French Jewish population.

Therefore, the SS decided to add French Jews to the pile for Auschwitz, killing those who were unfit for work, and exploiting the able-bodied. Just as every frakking history book on the subject says.

A policy of keeping Jews alive only temporarily would make sense if their labor was necessary. But it wasn't. It would make sense if Jews were considered to be stronger and better able to work under harsh conditions than non-Jews. But the Nazis considered Jews weak and lazy. It would make sense if the Jews possessed certain skills that were necessary but uncommon among the non-Jews. But skill-sets weren't taken into consideration on the ramp. Jews were selected for work based upon an instant assessment of their physical prowess made by an SS doctor (nearly always Mengele) and their ability to perform menial labor.

(sigh) See above. This is becoming exceedingly tiresome.

Jews being selected on the ramp to work in 1944 might make sense but what were the Nazis doing with all those Jews prior to 1944 but after the decision had been made to completely exterminate of all the Jews in Europe?

See above.

Your scenario becomes more befuddled as you go along. When had Jews been uprooted from their jobs and livelihoods in France, Belgium and the Netherlands and been deported? Prior to 1944?

See above.

So they were sitting around being housed and fed by people who planned on killing them all since 1941/1942?

Sitting around where? Jews in western Europe were shipped out almost as fast as they could be by the Nazis, and until spring 1943 uniformly sent to Auschwitz where they were either killed on arrival or selected for work. Once selected, they did not 'sit around' but were put to work building the camp or they became ill and were selected for the gas chambers after a few weeks in one of multiple selections.

Or were they allowed to remain at their jobs and earn their livelihood until 1944 even though the Nazis had planned to kill them all since 1941/1942?

The only real exception in western Europe was the treatment of Jewish electronics workers employed by the Dutch firm of Philips, who were kept until 1944 at their usual jobs then deported to Auschwitz, before being transferred en bloc to work in German factories, after the U-turn of May 1944.

Your description of how Jewish labor was exploited is consistent with a policy of exploiting Jewish labor.

and with killing the unfit, which you don't explaoin.

A policy of killing all the Jews who were unfit for work isn't consistent with an old-age ghetto at Theresienstadt.

But it is consistent with a policy of killing all unfit Jews subjected to the Final Solution. The Jews of Theresienstadt were exempted from the Final Solution. These exemptions applied only to German and Austrian Jews.

A policy of wanting to kill all the Jews isn't consistent with keeping some of them alive to work unless their labor was absolutely critical--which it wasn't.

Your repetitions don't add anything here except to confirm you don't understand the history. If you really believe the nonsense you are spouting, try narrating the evidence properly, as I have been doing, and explain what happens to each group affected by Nazi policy from 1942 onwards. I bet you can't do it.

At the end of the war, food shortages in the camps were reaching crisis proportions. Non-Jews and Jews were dropping like flies. Shifting resources to the non-Jews would've helped alleviate some of the problems while simultaneously accelerating the physical extermination of all the Jews.

Now you're talking at the end of the war. I was talking about May 1944 onwards, when the situation was somewhat different. The food factor varied almost year on year depending on harvests, the extent of occupied territory available for exploitation, and so on. In the summer of 1944, the Nazis still controlled Hungary, for example - with a lot of agricultural land. By the spring of 1945, they had lost virtually all of Hungary, and the agricultural cycle was a long way off a new harvest.

So when in May 1944, Hitler decided to reverse Nazi policy and bring Jews back to the Reich for work, the decision was predicated on a need for labour. The labour factor overrode other considerations. The Jewish KZ inmates would be fed at KZ ration scales, which were not huge. Thus, the KZ system expanded considerably, going from 300,000 to 700,000 over the course of 1944. The death rate also climbed, due to the influx of new prisoners, and concomitant shortages at various points. KZ labour was a last-resort measure because it was inefficient, due to SS incompetence, brutality and the rapid improvisation of the new expanded camp system.

By the spring of 1945, the system was breaking down, but also we note that the Final Solution was formally over. It had stopped in November 1944. Jewish KZ inmates continued to be subjected to antisemitic discrimination and torments at the hands of the SS after November 1944, and died in quite large numbers. The end of the Third Reich is still part of the Holocaust, but that term refers to the entire gamut of treatment of Jews by the Nazis and their collaborators from 1933 to 1945. Jews dying in Belse died in the Holocaust, but they did not die in the Final Solution.

And sorry, you don't get to dictate the terms here, they are in far wider use than your pathetic obfuscation routine.

If there was a firm policy of physical extermination the actual fate of the Jews in Europe doesn't reflect that.

On the contrary, the numbers clearly do reflect such a policy.

By 1945, at least 5.1 million Jews had been killed by the Nazis or their allies. Even subtracting the 300,000 or so killed by the Romanians, the Nazis themselves had killed 4.8 million Jews. In January 1945, the Nazis had direct physical control over about 300,000 Jews in the KZ system all working as labourers or about to be dumped in an overflow camp like Belsen and left to die. They also had direct physical control over the privileged Theresienstadt ghetto, with fewer than 40,000 inmates, and potentially direct control over a few 10s of 1000s of privileged Jews in mixed marriages across the Greater German Reich.

Since Jews in mixed-marriages or in Theresienstadt were privileged, the key numbers are 4.8 million, and 300,000. A 16:1 ratio.

You say that the physical extermination of all the Jews in Europe is a strawman that I don't want to give up. I say it's a central pillar of the holocaust. What you have described and what in fact actually happened to the Jews cannot be said to be evidence for a plan for the physical extermination of all the Jews in Europe. I'm happy to drop it. Since you've already said that six million isn't a precise number, that leaves only the gas chambers that are in dispute.

"Dropping it" isn't good enough. If you "drop it" then you will undoubtedly bring this crap up again at a future date, resulting in the same spiral of incomprehension from you and the same strawmen.

My position is the one in the history books: the Nazis and their fascist allies killed between 5-6 million Jews during WWII, in my view something above 5.3 million Jews, of whom 2.6 million died in death camps or en route, more than 2 million were shot, and about 700,000 died in ghettos or in 'ordinary' camps. This picture is essentially the same as you will get from any other historian. In particular, the death camp figures have wide agreement because of the research done in the past 20 years. Well under half the victims of the Holocaust were killed on arrival in death camps.

The Nazis carried out this genocide in order to meet the goal of destroying the Jewish race in Europe. This goal was articulated by Hitler and other leading Nazis between January 1939 and January 1942, at first as a threat (Hitler's prophecy speech of January 1939) and from the outbreak of war, as a looming reality. It is my view that Hitler decided to order the extermination of the Jews of Europe in December 1941 once the war had become a world war, in accordance with his 'prophecy'. By this time, more than a million Jews were dead.

Hitler is not known as being big on details, and so when the order was passed down to Himmler and Heydrich, it was modified, in reaction to multiple pressures from multiple agencies as well as the desires and intentions of the SS. The ultimate goal was destruction, but this would take place in stages and proceed across Europe step by step. To forestall objections and head off unrest inside Germany and inside the NSDAP from less than fanatical Nazis, various exemptions were granted, which also helped create a cover legend. This, in essence, is the Wannsee conference.

Clearly, the Nazis implemented that plan through 1942 to spring 1944, with some modifications, but the course of events from March 1944 to May 1944 is recognisably the same as a sane reading of Wannsee.

The Nazis also kept on referring to the destruction of the Jews, both in Hitler speeches and in statements by Himmler as well as Hans Frank and others. The Nazis were hardly unaware of the potential contradictions. In mid-1943 Hans Frank said for example:

How, it is often asked, can the need to cooperate with an alien culture be reconciled with the ideological aim of - say - wiping out the Polish people (Volkstum)? How is the need to maintain industrial output compatible with the need, for example, to annihilate the Jews?

Thus Frank saw what you seemingly cannot, which is that the ideological goal of destroying the Jews had to be harmonised with other factors and requirements. The solution chosen was terrifyingly elegant.

Planning to enslave the Jews for forced labor until they dropped dead could be said to be a plan to kill them all if measures were taken to hasten their demise while on the job. But there isn't any documentary evidence of this of which I am aware.

Firstly, the statement in Wannsee about finishing off the remnant refers to a future time after the decimation of Jews under forced labour conditions. It doesn't refer to a fully worked out strategy of 'destruction through labour'. The wording of Wannsee makes it clear that the decimation of Jews through forced labour would come out 'naturally'. This is precisely what happened. Jews dropped dead in very large numbers from exhaustion and malnutrition, or were selected for gas chambers or shot once they were judged to be exhausted.

Sterilizing all the Jews who were kept alive to work could be seen as a plan to eventually kill the Jews but even that didn't happen.

And yet, the SS conducted experiments throughout 1942 to 1944 to organise an efficient means of mass sterilisation, at Auschwitz, using Jewish women as test subjects, with a view for the longer term for 'after the war'. Sterilisation was clearly repeatedly proposed as a solution to e.g. the Mischlinge question, exemptions for Jews in mixed-marriages, and for the Jewish workforce spared temporarily for labour. The very fact that in the Wannsee protocol, there was much discussion of the need to sterilise Mischlinge indicates that any solution to the Jewish Question was going to be biological. That isn't something which even vaguely supports a 'revisionist' position, sorry.

You keep pretending to answer the question but you haven't done so.

Cut the crap. I've answered the question so many times now you are running out of ways to obfuscate my answers. You simply won't accept that the goal of Vernichtung der juedischen Rasse was simply, flatly, end-of-story, carried out in stages. The unfit died first, the able bodied were decimated, only the end of the war saved a remnant, in what is a worse than 16:1 ratio for Jews subjected to the Final Solution.

Where was the documentation on the deportation of 437,000 Jews from Hungary found?

And there you go claiming to have read Hilberg.

Pray tell, are you about to try the Butz argument that 437,000 Hungarian Jews weren't deported, because if so it would amuse me greatly. The records are largely those of the German embassy in Budapest, who sent out virtually daily reports to Berlin, corroborated by other Nazi sources received in other agencies, together with Hungarian records, including multiple Hungarian Gendarmerie reports, most notably a record of all the trains that passed through Kosice on the way to Poland with the number of passegers recorded for each of them.

Are there records of their arrival at Auschwitz that were found at Auschwitz?

Some, but I already explained that most Auschwitz records were destroyed.

Are the 110,000 who were selected and sent to other camps considered durchgangjuden?

Minus the 29,000 registered at Auschwitz itself, yes. By all means provide hard evidence that there were more than 80,000 Hungarian Durchgangsjuden.

The Hungarian Action really is the end-game for Holocaust denial, by the way. There was no 'east' left into which 320,000 unfit Jews could be deported. There was nowhere in Poland or Germany where the Nazis could possibly have put them and not been noticed or recorded in some fashion. 437,000 Jews were demonstrably deported. The deportations happened so late in the war that a large proportion of the registered Jews survived. They gave at least 5,000 testimonies in 1945, and many more since then, which match up to the picture from documents. The size of the transports, etc, are confirmed many times over.
 
Last edited:
Only 1,300 calories a day? That's not even 37% more than the 950 calories per day the Germans were getting in the American zone in July 1945 (Decision in Germany, Lucas Clay, page 264).

But far more than there German guards and the communities around the camps were getting at the time, when there was no wide spread starvation among the civilian population. Nor were those Germans in the American zone forced into slave labour.

Nor was there an equivalent to the Frank diary, (that's Hans, not Anne) who boldy states "That we sentence 1.2 million Jews to die of hunger should be noted only marginally. It is a matter, of course, that should the Jews not starve to death it would, we hope, result in a speeding up of anti-Jewish measures." Not to mention "It is clear that the working program is made difficult when in the middle of the program, during the war, the order for complete annihilation of the Jews is given. The responsibility for this cannot be placed upon the government of the General Government. The directive for the annihilation of the Jews comes from higher quarters."

No one denies that post-war Germany suffered famine as a result of Nazi policies, so what *was* your point?
 
Perhaps you and your buddies will apply your comedic talents now to this bit of sexually tinged imagery from Samuel Willenberg, also discussing Treblinka, in this case the prisoners' choice of a man from Warsaw to supply weapons for the inmate rebellion:

Quote:
The grenades were taken in buckets covered with rags. Everything was placed beneath piles of potatoes, which served as the location at which the weapons were distributed. Slowly the rifles and bullets were removed. Everyone who knew how to use a hand grenade received grenades. We also had several revolvers. Additional weapons were supplied us by the storekeeper, a young, very ugly man from Warsaw whom we nicknamed “The Ape.” It was he who that morning had distributed to the conspirators a larger number of axes and wire-cutters than usual and several pairs of pliers. Many of us had hammers, knives, clubs, gasoline cans. . . .

Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, but I know we can count on you to explain away that truism.

Sounds to me like this Samuel Willenberg is a catty little starts-with-b-and-rhymes-with-witch. Sam and all the in-crowd prisoners make up names for other prisoners who aren't as attractive as they are but don't have a problem with using them when they need something from them. Calling somebody ugly doesn't sound overtly sexual. It's just kind of petty.
 
Something to add, and I really think this deserves a reply.

In effect, Dogzilla is arguing that a Soviet soldier captured in June 1942 would have to be so in fear of Stalin, that rather than simply go along with being used as a forced labourer, the best option for them was to volunteer for the SS.

It's an utter absurdity.

That is an utter absurdity. It's crazy talk. What kind of a moron would say something like that? Nobody even mentioned a fear of Stalin at all until Dogzilla suddenly brings it up back in post number.....well I can't find exactly when he brought it up or how he said it or what the context was but I do know it was out of context and not relevant. Why does Dogzilla think the fear of Stalin has anything to do with deciding to be a slave or volunteering for the SS? This incredulous goal-post moving quote mine strawman is the reason nobody takes Dogzilla seriously.

Tell us Dog, why do you hate the Jews?
 
That's not in the least surprising, considering it was originally proposed by a brain-dead Nazi.

It's not surprising that a brain dead Nazi would think Nazism is a viable political alternative. Thinking Nazism is a viable political alternative is what makes a brain dead Nazi a brain dead Nazi. What is surprising is why YOU think Nazism would be a viable political alternative if it weren't for the holocausting.


You'll have to ask Harold Covington.

Isn't he a Nazi? If so, that's probably why he thinks it's a viable political alternative.


I think you're projecting just a wee bit. There's no "secret cabal", just a tiny handful of impotent racists and anti-semites wanking over the thought of a world that will never come to pass.

You say there's a group of racists and anti-semites who have come up with what appears to you to be a workable plan to convince the world there was never a holocaust so they can take over and kill all the Jews. Explain how that would work without invoking a conspiracy.


No, that's because Holocaust denial requires an insanely stupid and convoluted conspiracy to explain away all the historical evidence, placing it on the same level as Moon Landing Hoax theories and the idea that the world is secretly controlled by shapeshifting alien lizards from the lower fourth dimension.

No it doesn't. But if you believe in the rehabilitating the Nazi's conspiracy you're susceptible to any form of woo.
 
(sigh) We went over this a few weeks ago. You are trying to use an exemption from being subjected to the Final Solution to dispute the meaning of the Final Solution. Jews sent to Theresienstadt belonged to a variety of privileged classes of German and Austrian Jews; these privileges were not extended to Jews of other European nations, who were subjected to deportation to Auschwitz or another camp in Poland, and were selected on arrival into unfit and able-bodied groups, with the unfit being killed immediately.

So the German Jewish people were not really the problem. It was the pesky Dutch Jews and other European Jews.

Previously in this thread we were told Theresienstadt was a showcase camp.
 
It wasn't. But that's not what I said. I said "he was legally judged to be a lying Nazi hack in his own libel lawsuit". And he was.

Here's what Justice Grey said in his judgment:

"Irving has for his own ideological reasons persistently and deliberately misrepresented and manipulated historical evidence; that for the same reasons he has portrayed Hitler in an unwarrantedly favourable light, principally in relation to his attitude towards and responsibility for the treatment of the Jews; that he is an active Holocaust denier; that he is anti-Semitic and racist, and that he associates with right-wing extremists who promote neo-Nazism."

In other words, Irving is a lying Nazi hack.

Justice Grey also said of Irving: Many of his works have been published by houses of the highest standing and have attracted favourable reviews. It is beyond dispute that over the years (Irving is now aged 62), he has devoted an enormous amount of time to researching and chronicling the history of the Third Reich. The books themselves are eloquent testimony to his industry and diligence."

In other words, a well respected historian.
 
David Irving received a new assignment and identity from the "Nazis"...

Dogzilla said:
EDIT: Even David Irving has better credentials than Faurisson, and he was legally judged to be a lying Nazi hack in his own libel lawsuit!
I don't recall "lying Nazi hack" being used to describe Irving in the judgement. Perhaps you can quote the sentence to me?
It wasn't. But that's not what I said. I said "he was legally judged to be a lying Nazi hack in his own libel lawsuit". And he was.

Here's what Justice Grey said in his judgment:

"Irving has for his own ideological reasons persistently and deliberately misrepresented and manipulated historical evidence; that for the same reasons he has portrayed Hitler in an unwarrantedly favourable light, principally in relation to his attitude towards and responsibility for the treatment of the Jews; that he is an active Holocaust denier; that he is anti-Semitic and racist, and that he associates with right-wing extremists who promote neo-Nazism."

In other words, Irving is a lying Nazi hack.

Computer hacker:

CBC Discusses Nazi Hack

(...) The focus of the story was on the hacked emails and websites that were published not long ago.


Perverted Politician:

The Governor, A Swinish Neo-Nazi Hack... [Explicit] - From the Album The Kentucky Derby Is Decadent And Depraved [Explicit]

Philosopher:

SATURDAY, OCTOBER 24, 2009

"A Prolific, Provincial Nazi Hack."

No, not this one.

This one.
 
..intellectual hypocrites pretending that Elie Wiesel is not being "COACHED, EXCUSED OR CITED" as "history" in the classrooms...

Clayton Moore said:
Team Holocaust is like the martyred wife who coaches her young children to falsely testify that her husband molested them.
Because you seem have been using it to describe those who point out your ignorance here --- AND NOT ONE OF US HAS COACHED, EXCUSED OR CITED Wiesel.

Elie Wiesel
Lesson plans for Night

(...)

Colors and Symbols of Stigmatization
The students will research the different colors and symbols used to symbolize the Nazi party's list of undesirable people. The students will gain an understanding of how other people can arbitrarily judge other people as inferior. This activity is designed as a prereading activity for Night.

Divine Impulses: Elie Wiesel
Video, about 4 1/2 minutes, of Wiesel's interview with Sally Quinn. He mentions "losing everything" to Bernard Madoff and the metaphor of Cain and Abel.

Elie Wiesel: First Person Singular
Biography, a teacher guide, and links to additional resources. This site supports the video/DVD available from PBS.

(...)

Teaching Historical Background
More lesson plans and resources for teaching about the Holocaust.


http://www.webenglishteacher.com/wiesel.html

Lesson Plan
Using Student-Centered Comprehension Strategies with Elie Wiesel’s Night

(...)

Working in small groups, students use reciprocal teaching strategies as they read and discuss Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel’s memoir Night. Everyone in the classroom takes a turn assuming the “teacher” role, as the class works with four comprehension strategies: predicting, question generating, summarizing, and clarifying.


http://www.readwritethink.org/class...using-student-centered-comprehension-884.html

Lessons from Elie Wiesel’s Classroom

(...)

I was 19 when I entered Prof. Wiesel’s first class at Boston University. I’m 53 now, and I still get a thrill from being there, a feeling of awe, gratitude and hope for our world. The lessons I keep learning have helped me throughout my life.

This semester Prof. Wiesel is teaching his own works, fiction and non-fiction. I attended a class that focused on his book, “The Trial of G-d,” and another using “Legends of Our Time,” one of my favorite of his more than 50 books he’s written. The lecture on Monday evening, Nov. 1 was entitled, “The Rebbe of Ger – A Tragedy in Hasidism.”

Cantor Deborah Katchko-Gray is cantor and musical director at Temple Shearith Israel in Ridgefield.


http://www.jewishledger.com/2010/12/lessons-from-elie-wiesels-classroom/

Teaching Elie Wiesel’s Night:

Workbook Questions and
Critical Reflection Exercises

By Chris Frost
San Diego State University

(...)

Critical feeling concerns mindful attention to values, priorities, and meanings—
aspects of life sometimes neglected in favor of more rational, analytical and “scientific” modes (see, e.g., the essay on using Night in a “Religion, Science and the Quest for Meaning” course). However, as the Holocaust reminds us, realities of life are not always logical or rational. In teaching his own work, for example, Wiesel began with this statement: “I hope that you will understand that which cannot be understood.” It may be that intellectual analysis and critical thinking are necessary, but perhaps not sufficient, components of the type of deep understanding that Wiesel has in mind here.


http://www.wtamu.edu/webres/File/Academics/NightWorkbook.pdf

Twitter: Memoirs & Personal Narratives

Every Fall students accost me in the classroom, on the way to lunch and even exiting the bathroom. They clutch college application essays that they beg me to read. I’m usually not the first teacher they approach. They want as many opinions as possible. They’re terrified their writing is not any good. Often, it is not.

(...)

Consider working on these skills with any personal essays, narrative non-fiction, or memoir units you already employ. Here is a short list of texts with which this type of an assignment might be paired.

(...)

Night, Elie Wiesel


http://wheretheclassroomends.com/tag/elie-wiesel
 
The German Social Nationalist Soldiers in The Concentration Camps from 1939 to 1945

From invincible brutes to clueless idiots! From Europeans to Americans to Asians to Oceanians to Africans!

A marvellous master piece staged in the General Holocaust Denial Discussion Part II

Scene 1:

Eddie Dane said:
Germany's intelligentsia fled this retarded vortex of stupidity and violence, including almost everyone smart enough to develop the atom bomb.

Of course, in CMWorld, the rat poison is right next to the salt, and the Nazi is too stupid to notice the Jewis cook using the former rather than the latter.

Why do you think the Nazis were so stupid, CM?

And not only that, the Nazis let the Jews pocket scalpels as a matter of course, and walk around the camp slashing at anything that moved.

Why do you think the Nazis were so stupid, CM?

Kind of makes you wonder - trusting as they were - why the Nazis stationed armed guards at the camps, had watchtowers placed along camp perimeters, had punishment cells, whipped and executed prisoners for infractions, and made use of barbed wire in their various camps. Must have been designed to keep out people rushing to enjoy the perks of camp living?

(...) also discussing Treblinka, in this case the prisoners' choice of a man from Warsaw to supply weapons for the inmate rebellion:

The grenades were taken in buckets covered with rags. Everything was placed beneath piles of potatoes, which served as the location at which the weapons were distributed. Slowly the rifles and bullets were removed. Everyone who knew how to use a hand grenade received grenades. We also had several revolvers. Additional weapons were supplied us by the storekeeper, a young, very ugly man from Warsaw whom we nicknamed “The Ape.” It was he who that morning had distributed to the conspirators a larger number of axes and wire-cutters than usual and several pairs of pliers. Many of us had hammers, knives, clubs, gasoline cans. . . .

ANTPogo said:
That's not in the least surprising, considering it was originally proposed by a brain-dead Nazi.

TSR said:
Were such staff ever not accompanied by armed guards?

Scene 2:

000063 said:
And what about the frequent genocides in Africa? Why aren't the victims rising up there? What about, oh, the Bosnian genocides? Or any other ethnic cleansing program? Union troubles very rarely involve people being killed and oppressed wholesale.

TSR said:
You mean like the Tutsis?

The Armenians?

The Darfur?

The Cambodians?

The Rwandans?

The Bosnians?

The Ukranians?

The Ainu?

The Amerinds?

The Tasmanians?

The End.
 
Nick Terry said:
Theresienstadt belonged to a variety of privileged classes of German and Austrian Jews

So the German Jewish people were not really the problem. It was the pesky Dutch Jews and other European Jews.

Clayton, please try reading the whole sentence. If you get sentences right today, you may be able to move onto whole paragraphs in a year or two.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.

Back
Top Bottom