General Holocaust Denial Discussion Part II

[000063]

The truth needs to be puzzled together by reviewing several sources of information, revisionists do not get everything right, neither do Holocaust historians. It is entirely possible that a web site contains a valuable piece of information that is correct but contains other pieces of information that are incorrect. Claiming otherwise is a fallacy and shows a very binary world view.

Yes, it is possible. But I'm not asking you whether it's possible. I'm asking you whether you, personally, agree with the rest of the content on that web page, or just the section you quoted, or even the section you quoted and other portions of the page, or any other combination, including having no opinion.

I never made the claims that you imply - but do not state - that I did. I merely asked you a)if you agreed with the section you quoted, and b)if you agreed with the rest of the page. Both were yes or no questions, and open-ended. You still haven't answered.

I note that you did not quote, and do not contest, my claim that the apparent discrepancy has been explained. So nice to see you've conceded that line of argument.

So what's the official number for the Japanese deaths in those camps? Oh wait, there aren't any official figures. I wonder why.

Do you have some sort of point? Some sort of evidence-backed claim that's actually relevant to the Holocaust? What do you think the lack of official figures implies? And why are you suddenly responding to a post from over a month ago? Why did you only quote part of my post?

 

[Natan]

4. It has been said that there are entries in the diary in ballpoint pen. Is that correct?
No, that is not correct. All the diary entries are written in various types of ink and (coloured) pencil, not in ballpoint. The document analysis by the Netherlands Forensic Institute showed that the main part of the diary and the loose sheets were written in grey-blue fountain pen ink. In addition, Anne also used thin red ink, green and red coloured pencils and black pencil for her annotations: not ballpoint. Nevertheless, the allegation can still regularly be seen on extreme right-wing websites and elsewhere that the diary of Anne Frank is written in ballpoint pen. Sneering remarks are made about "A. Frank the ballpoint girl," and it is pointed out that the ballpoint pen only came into common use in Europe after the Second World War. The conclusion forced by this allegation is that the texts in the diary could not have been written by Anne Frank herself.

Once again, I put that link up for fake Holocaust testimonies, not to start discussing Anne Frank or whatever. And further, revisionists have also issues with other stuff than the whole ballpoint issue as you try to simplify it. I won't start discussing the poster-child of the Holocaust that was not killed by Einsatzgruppen, gas vans, gas chambers or working to death but by typhus which ironically Zyklon B could have prevented. I am still reading a book of a revisionist of why he thinks it is fake and I'm not remotely near halfway so I can't assess the whole argumentation on its merits yet.

 

[Natan]

In all, 120,313 people were under WRA control. 90,491 were transfered from assembly centers; 17,491 were taken directly from their homes; 5918 were born to imprisoned parents; 1735 were transferred from INS internment camps; 1579 were moved here after being sent from assembly centers to work crops; 1275 were transfered from penal and medial institutions; 1118 were taken from Hawaii; and 219, mostly non-Japanese spouses, entered voluntarily.7

Of these 120,313: 54,127 returned to the West Coast after their incarceration; 52,798 relocated to the interior; 4724 moved (or were moved) to Japan; 3121 were sent to INS internment camps; 2355 joined the armed forces; 1862 died during imprisonment; 1322 were sent to institutions; and 4 were classified as "unauthorized departures."

Source: Roger Daniels, Sandra Taylor, and Harry Kitano (eds), Japanese Americans, from Relocation to Redress; University of Utah Press; Salt Lake City, Utah, 1986, as cited on http://home.comcast.net/~chtongyu/internment/camps.html (note 7).

Those look like pretty official numbers to me....

Do you know what the NATURAL death rate would be for a random sample of the US population consisting of 120,313 over several years around the 1940s? Hint: the PER YEAR figure alone would be around 1862. The closest to an official figure I have seen is around 5,000 by some Japanese American author and even that is barely credible looking from an actuarial point of view.

 

[Robrob]

So what's the official number for the Japanese deaths in those camps? Oh wait, there aren't any official figures. I wonder why.

What's your point?

 

[triforcharity]

There are, actually. A good summary of figures and sources can be found in Japanese Americans, from Relocation to Redress.

Of the 120,313 Japanese-Americans interned in WRA camps from 1942 to 1946, 1862 died (including deaths of all causes), or just under 1.6% of those interned.

Contrast this to the Nazi concentration/death camp system, where the percentage of prisoners who died in the camps varied from 50% to 90%.

Which is about the average rate of death of the US at the time. So no real increase of deaths do to the internment camps.

 

[Aulus Agerius]

Do you know what the NATURAL death rate would be for a random sample of the US population consisting of 120,313 over several years around the 1940s? Hint: the PER YEAR figure alone would be around 1862. The closest to an official figure I have seen is around 5,000 by some Japanese American author and even that is barely credible looking from an actuarial point of view.

Well at least you appear to be consistent in your idiosyncratic method of evaluating history. Any figure that doesn't sound right to you, by your own crude estimation, you instantly disbelieve without further investigation.

The crude death rate for the US in 1940 was 1,076.4 per 100,000 (or 1.0764%)(http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/vsus/VSUS_1940_2.pdf, page 18) would suggest deaths per year for a population 120,313 of 1295.05 (not particularly close to 1862). However, a population effectively imprisoned is not like the population at large. For example 26.2/100,000 were due to motor vehicle accidents, 6.2 and 14.4 respectively were due to homicide and suicide. How far were internees exposed to these risks?

Further, if you've bothered to look at the article Nick Terry linked you'd see that the camps were located generally in the east and south, not on the east coast. Death rates were highest in New England and the Mid Atlantic. There are doubtless more factors that could skew death rates in favor internees. For example, were they, in fact, like a random sample of the US population? Younger, older?

So, if you're really interested in assessing whether the death rate is as expected, you've got a pretty long way to go. However, even if you were to examine and attempt to account for all these variables, you would still not be disproving the "official" figure. Have you even tried to find out where those historians got the 1862 figure? How was it calculated?

To drag this back towards the actual topic, are you actually trying to say that 1862 is too low therefore the "real" figure was higher, therefore the US carried out an extermination program against Japanese-Americans between 1942 and 1946?

If so, that's an interesting leap given your denial of an extermination program that did exist. Why are you so willing to impute genocide to the US and yet so reluctant to accept the Nazi genocide?

 

[Straw Man]

Which is about the average rate of death of the US at the time. So no real increase of deaths do to the internment camps.

There were as many as 20 shot whilst trying to escape. How does that relate to the amount of Der Untermensch who felt Nazi lead?

 

[Robrob]

Once again, I put that link up for fake Holocaust testimonies, not to start discussing Anne Frank or whatever.

So as evidence you linked to a site with lies in its very first line, and that's our fault?

And further, revisionists have also issues with other stuff than the whole ballpoint issue as you try to simplify it.

So now you are defending the claims you just tried to deny?

 

[Belz...]

Do you know what the NATURAL death rate would be for a random sample of the US population consisting of 120,313 over several years around the 1940s? Hint: the PER YEAR figure alone would be around 1862. The closest to an official figure I have seen is around 5,000 by some Japanese American author and even that is barely credible looking from an actuarial point of view.

Meanwhile, I'm still waiting for even ONE laughable witness, let alone 50.

 

[Nick Terry]

Do you know what the NATURAL death rate would be for a random sample of the US population consisting of 120,313 over several years around the 1940s? Hint: the PER YEAR figure alone would be around 1862. The closest to an official figure I have seen is around 5,000 by some Japanese American author and even that is barely credible looking from an actuarial point of view.

Two posters (ANTPogo and myself) have supplied you with what are evidently the official US government statistics for the internment of Japanese Americans during WWII. We even named the same secondary source - given that the moderated thread means we didn't see each other's posts, that is a good recommendation.

The figures broke down properly, whereas your Japanese American author saying 5,000 is you relying on memory w/o providing a source. And yet you don't believe the 5,000 figure for 'actuarial' reasons. Whatever. Your insinuation that there weren't any official figures has been shot down in flames.

Undoubtedly, the majority of the 1862 deaths during internment were among elderly Japanese Americans who may well have died anyway, but some would have died prematurely because of lack of medical care, especially in the early stages when the camp system was being set up.

It doesn't actually absolve the US government of the responsibility for those deaths because they occurred while the internees were under the care of the government. The US government later acknowledged that the internment was an injustice and paid out substantial sums in compensation. (Gee... that sounds familiar!)

What is sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander; historians blame the Soviet and Polish governments for deaths of elderly ethnic Germans during the expulsions from Eastern Europe in 1945, and they blame the Nazi regime for deaths of elderly Jews sent to Theresienstadt, and they blame Stalin for the deaths of elderly kulaks deported to Siberia in 1930, and they blame the British for the deaths of elderly Boers in concentration camps in South Africa during the Boer War, and so on. Because any death in confinement is the responsibility of the one who interned the civilians.

But they're also quite able to notice the differences in death rates between all of these unjust internments. The Japanese American internment camps were not concentration camps. The death rate doesn't rise much above the natural death rate for the US population of that era.

Frankly I'm puzzled because you accept that fact yet still brought up the usual denier talking point of the Japanese American internment camps. Presumably to make the Nazi concentration camps seem better and the US government seem worse.

Unfortunately the moral equivalence backfires on you, because it's widely accepted that the internment of Japanese Americans was unjust, even under wartime conditions and a panic about spies. And the US government paid out large sums in compensation... much like the West German government paid out large sums in compensation to those its predecessor had interned in KZs. Hmmm... maybe paying out compensation is the mark of a rich Western society that can afford to acknowledge historic wrongs and that wants to avoid letting complaints fester.

You'll also notice that American society is not unaware of the internment of Japanese Americans and has also evidently taken some of the lessons to heart, especially regarding civil liberties. The US didn't round up all Arab Americans after 9/11 for mass internment during the 'war' on terror. And contrary to CT blether the FEMA death camps slated for woos and pseudo-patriots don't exist.

 

[000063]

Once again, I put that link up for fake Holocaust testimonies, not to start discussing Anne Frank or whatever. And further, revisionists have also issues with other stuff than the whole ballpoint issue as you try to simplify it. I won't start discussing the poster-child of the Holocaust that was not killed by Einsatzgruppen, gas vans, gas chambers or working to death but by typhus which ironically Zyklon B could have prevented.

You are aware that shedloads of people died from disease in the camps and ghettos, right?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Holocaust#Ghettos_.281940.E2.80.931945.29

From 1940 through 1942, starvation and disease, especially typhoid, killed hundreds of thousands. Over 43,000 residents of the Warsaw ghetto died there in 1941,[95] more than one in ten; in Theresienstadt, more than half the residents died in 1942.[94]

No one with any knowledge of the Holocaust asserts that people didn't die of disease. But most of the time, the only reason they had those diseases was because of the crappy health situation in the ghettos and camps. And why was that situation in place? Oh, yes, the Nazis.

I am still reading a book of a revisionist of why he thinks it is fake and I'm not remotely near halfway so I can't assess the whole argumentation on its merits yet.

One book? One? Doc Terry has literally given a list of dozens of books on the Holocaust, and you think a single book from a revisionist will give the whole picture?

Do you know what the NATURAL death rate would be for a random sample of the US population consisting of 120,313 over several years around the 1940s? Hint: the PER YEAR figure alone would be around 1862. The closest to an official figure I have seen is around 5,000 by some Japanese American author and even that is barely credible looking from an actuarial point of view.

You're an actuary? Did you ask an actuary? Are you planning to answer whether you actually believe any of the page you quoted? Because thinking debunkers disagree with each other on some minor point doesn't do any good if they both still disagree with you.

...

So now you are defending the claims you just tried to deny?

I'm pretty sure he's trying to avoid actually claiming anything.

 

[Natan]

One book? One? Doc Terry has literally given a list of dozens of books on the Holocaust, and you think a single book from a revisionist will give the whole picture?

That's one book specific on the issue of Anne Frank. Doc Terry gracefully indeed gave me a literature list on the Holocaust in general.

Further, if you have a population containing all age groups at random and with some simplified assumptions as life expectancy being constant and all that, and if average life expectancy is 70 years, it follows simplified every year 1/70th of that group dies off. 120,313 / 70 is around 1700+ or quite close to the utterly RIDICULOUS figure of 1862 over FOUR years.

 

[Natan]

Just found a more credible figure:

Japanese internment camps varied considerably in their harshness, though few were as bad as Japanese prisoner of war camps. The mortality rate was about a third that of American prisoners of war: Out of 130,895 interned Allied civilians, 14,650 or 11.2 percent died in captivity, versus 35 percent of American POWs (Frank 1999).
http://pwencycl.kgbudge.com/I/n/Internment.htm​

 

[swright777]

Just found a more credible figure:

Japanese internment camps varied considerably in their harshness, though few were as bad as Japanese prisoner of war camps. The mortality rate was about a third that of American prisoners of war: Out of 130,895 interned Allied civilians, 14,650 or 11.2 percent died in captivity, versus 35 percent of American POWs (Frank 1999).
http://pwencycl.kgbudge.com/I/n/Internment.htm​

You're comparing mortality rates of allied civilians held by Japan to allied POWs held by Japan. What do these figures have to do with Japanese internment camps in the USA? Or with your previous post, for that matter?

 

[SpitfireIX]

Just found a more credible figure:

Japanese internment camps varied considerably in their harshness, though few were as bad as Japanese prisoner of war camps. The mortality rate was about a third that of American prisoners of war: Out of 130,895 interned Allied civilians, 14,650 or 11.2 percent died in captivity, versus 35 percent of American POWs (Frank 1999).
http://pwencycl.kgbudge.com/I/n/Internment.htm​

Did you even read your source? This is the figure for Allied civilians interned by the Japanese in conquered American, British, and Dutch possessions.

The preceding paragraph:

Internment was not pleasant, but morbidity and mortality rates in American internment camps were not significantly different from those in the general population, suggesting that living conditions were acceptable, if somewhat Spartan. Barracks in internment camps were built to the same standards as military barracks for active duty troops (and often by the same contractors.) There were several instances of Japanese-Americans living outside the West Coast voluntarily joining their relatives in the internment camps. As the war progressed, many camp commanders gave the internees increased freedom to come and go from their camps, and some internees were able to find sponsors outside the West Coast and thereby secure their release. None of these observations are meant to condone the internment; they are meant to put the internment in perspective at a time when Germany was systematically slaughtering millions of Jews and Japan was treating civilian internees with great cruelty. [bolding mine]

Epic fail.

 

[Border Reiver]

You do realize of course that the figures you just quoted were for Japanese run camps don't you?

 

[000063]

That's one book specific on the issue of Anne Frank. Doc Terry gracefully indeed gave me a literature list on the Holocaust in general.

Further, if you have a population containing all age groups at random and with some simplified assumptions as life expectancy being constant and all that, and if average life expectancy is 70 years, it follows simplified every year 1/70th of that group dies off. 120,313 / 70 is around 1700+ or quite close to the utterly RIDICULOUS figure of 1862 over FOUR years.

I'm not sure what point you're trying to make, or why, once again, you responded to only the single line of my post that you dared to instead of answering my questions about what you actually believe.

Oh, and you're wrong. Life expectancy is a curve. The amount of people who die generally goes up as age increases. Therefore, you can't simply divide by 70. Your initial premise is false, therefore your subsequent arguments can't hold.

Incidentally, the article you quoted says, clearly,

Internment was not pleasant, but morbidity and mortality rates in American internment camps were not significantly different from those in the general population, suggesting that living conditions were acceptable, if somewhat Spartan.
...
There were several instances of Japanese-Americans living outside the West Coast voluntarily joining their relatives in the internment camps. As the war progressed, many camp commanders gave the internees increased freedom to come and go from their camps, and some internees were able to find sponsors outside the West Coast and thereby secure their release. None of these observations are meant to condone the internment; they are meant to put the internment in perspective at a time when Germany was systematically slaughtering millions of Jews and Japan was treating civilian internees with great cruelty.

Rut roh, raggy.

This whole thing about the Japanese camps is a red herring anyway. They weren't nearly as bad as Holocaust camps, where inmates died in great numbers from any old thing, including the occasional gas chamber, at rates much, much higher than genpop. You nor any other denier in this thread has never answered the question of how, if the winter was responsible for inmates starving to death, why Germans outside the camps weren't starving as well. Because the only answers are incompetence or murder.

I think I see why deniers like to use only denier sources; because when they start to use more mainstream stuff, they have to start dodging questions about whether they believe the site's general position or whether they believe just the bits they want to quote-mine.

 

[Natan]

It was late, I made a serious mistake. That doesn't make the 1862 figure you guys used any more credible.

 

[Nick Terry]

That's one book specific on the issue of Anne Frank. Doc Terry gracefully indeed gave me a literature list on the Holocaust in general.

Further, if you have a population containing all age groups at random and with some simplified assumptions as life expectancy being constant and all that, and if average life expectancy is 70 years, it follows simplified every year 1/70th of that group dies off. 120,313 / 70 is around 1700+ or quite close to the utterly RIDICULOUS figure of 1862 over FOUR years.

Aside from your problems with life expectancy curves, you're not even reading the statistics right:

Of these 120,313: 54,127 returned to the West Coast after their incarceration; 52,798 relocated to the interior; 4724 moved (or were moved) to Japan; 3121 were sent to INS internment camps; 2355 joined the armed forces; 1862 died during imprisonment; 1322 were sent to institutions; and 4 were classified as "unauthorized departures."

More than half of the internees left the system. 4724 went to Japan, and 52,798 relocated to the interior after being interned. 2,355 joined the armed forces. 3,121 were sent to Immigration and Naturalization Service camps. Different program of internment. If an elderly Japanese agreed to move to the interior out of the west coast exclusion zone, like 52,798 internees did, then they could live and die at liberty, and would not be counted by the internment camp administration. Or they could choose repatriation and exchange.

The other thing you're missing completely is that this was a group composed of first- and second-generation immigrants. 80,000 of the internees were Nisei born in the US, i.e. 2/3rds of the internees. That meant many were born after 1924 because of the changes in citizenship regulations affecting Japanese immigrants. This simply isn't a demographic profile where one might expect to find a substantial number of old age pensioners.

So your profiling of a group 'containing all ages at random' is complete nonsense.

 

[Aulus Agerius]

It was late, I made a serious mistake. That doesn't make the 1862 figure you guys used any more credible.

You haven't presented any serious reason to doubt the figure's accuracy.
How about you work out why this is relevant to the holocaust.