Clearly, because citing a lack of physical evidence isn't a rational argument.
Asserting a lack of physical evidence when it actually exists is completely irrational, but is done routinely by Holocaust deniers.
This is only partly true because "Holocaust deniers" and their social affiliates aren't typically involved in the propaganda industry. Let's take a wild guess at which social group has a disproportionate dominance in this field.
Holocaust deniers aren't very involved in the media, arts, universities, schools or in genuine intellectual discourse. They are in fact pretty well shut out from public sphere in pretty much every single country in the West, regardless of what laws might or might not exist, and with no correlation between things like the size of the Jewish community or number of Holocaust museums.
The name a few: the Katyn Forest Massacre, prior claims of 'gas chambers' in every camp, "steam chambers", evidence of torture in many cases, highly apparent motive.
This is a Gish Gallop, and doesn't even make coherent sense in response to what uke2se wrote.
Like the fact that witnesses reported open air mass cremations and there is physical evidence of the cremation of human remains at the relevant sites. This would generally be regarded as corroboration.
During WWII Germany "ausrottung" was more closely defined as "uprooting", for which I can provide several examples. This changes the the perceived context of the Posen speech.
You're going to provide these examples, or just assert that words mean what you want them to, Alice in Wonderland style?
According to Dr. Wilhelm Staeglich, the speech in Sonthofen given by Himmler:
"refers to the execution of Jews only in connection with the fight against partisans and other bandits operating behind the German lines on the eastern front."
No it doesn't. The speech quite clearly refers to the mass murder of Jews including very explicitly, women and children. Sonthofen doesn't sit on its own - there are a whole string of documents which make the intent perfectly clear.
You don't seem to realise that your gurus or yourself have to explain
all of them. Together. Since your long dead guru Wilhelm Staeglich was writing originally in 1979, it's a dead cert that he missed a whole load of things which have been noticed in the past 33 years of research.
Regarding any reference to 'genocide':
"Even these excerpts — Peterson and Smith [publishers] do not give the whole texts of the speeches — must be regarded with skepticism, for they were taken from documents that are manifestly unreliable. In both of these cases, there are elements that strongly suggest a manipulation of text or forgery."
Utter nonsense. I'm sorry, but as soon as a denier starts spewing out forgery claims they might as well pack their bags and give up. Staeglich didn't even examine the original document so his assertion carries precisely zero weight.
But what is really intellectually offensive is the invocation of the standard denier trick 'it doesn't prove anything/but it's a forgery anyway'. Make up your mind - either it is an incriminating document or it's not. If it's not incriminating, there's no reason to allege forgery. Your claims are contradictory and illogical.
There is one revealing question about all of these proclaimed speeches:
If Himmler successfully ordered the destruction of 'incriminating evidence' pertaining to Jewish extermination, how would he forget about his own speeches? Why would he speak openly and on-record to an audience of thousands over an issue that was allegedly "so secret" that code names, verbal orders and an overwhelming lack of documentation was necessary?
The only revelation here is how confused your conflation of different issues has become, and your ignorance of the context.
Code words were used first and foremost to create psychological distance between the killers and their actions.
Verbal orders are given because the management style of the Nazi leadership preferred them on many occasions.
One set of documents can be ordered destroyed by one institution (such as Globocnik's SSPF Lublin staff, which reported that it burned the files from the Reinhard camps) and another set of documents might still be in use by another institution (such as Himmler's personal papers).
Try thinking through the bureaucracy involved.
By the way, the destruction of records is hardly unique to the SS. Less than 2% of the Luftwaffe records survived the war.
On that note, how many have heard of the Allied concentration camps in which more than 750,000 Germans were murdered post-war? Since negation of this event can be shown, who has been the negationist? Is it the US Government, the Jewish media bias in the United States and abroad or other anti-German interests? If so, doesn't that show these organizations are willing to lie? What does that say about 'the Holocaust', in general?
No such Allied "concentration camps" existed. You're repeating a long debunked claim by James Bacque which did not stand up to scrutiny.
Perhaps that is because Revisionists tend to admit when a lack of evidence exists rather than make up fairy tales to fill in gaps. This reminds me of why I am not religious; just because we don't know the answers doesn't mean "God did it" any more than it means "extermination plan". Ironically, both of these magical stories are dependent on 'eyewitness testimony'.
Obfuscating history by saying we cannot know something when we know perfectly well what happened isn't very convincing. This is why revisionism is essentially shut out. While you may convince yourself and a few others with bad arguments by analogy, the fact remains that 'revisionism' is negationism. It is always saying something did not happen and never, ever says clearly what actually did.
Unless you give me some kind of evidence to confirm what really did happen, if you say there were no gas chambers, then I will reply that they must have been abducted by Ernst Zundel's Nazi UFOs from the camps, because there is just as much evidence for that explanation as there is for any other claim you might make.
I find your neglect of 'gas chamber' evidence, which would account for more than half of the 'Holocaust', to be far more significant. The members of CODOH are still waiting for your response to both of these topics.
This discussion is not about me. It is about whether revisionism is anything more than a lunatic fringe belief espoused by what seem to be at best, a few hundred cranks on an exceedingly marginal internet forum like CODOH.
It's telling that in response to an observed weakness of revisionism, you simply try to shift the burden onto someone else and are effectively dodging the point.
I assume you would claim that the opposite cannot be said for Believers.
Protip: when you simply try to drag the other side down to your own level without refuting the point then it doesn't convince many people.
Really? From what I gather, Revisionists have held steadfast to the same basic assertions: no 'gas chambers', nothing close to '6 million' Jewish deaths, no 'extermination plan'.
And yet we have the spectacle of revisionist gurus contradicting each other on supposedly quite important points, like what the 'Vergasungskeller' document means. As I have reminded one of your brethren only recently, we see that the leading revisionist authors cannot agree on this simple matter of interpretation.
Arthur Butz says it was a carburetion chamber
Samuel Crowell says it was an air raid shelter
Carlo Mattogno says it was a delousing chamber
Robert Faurisson says it was a carburetion chamber, er morgue, er delousing chamber, er air raid shelter
They cannot all be right, so some of them are wrong.
Revisionism is quite obviously much more sophisticated than merely asserting three cardinal doctrines of faith. And it's when revisionists try to get clever and start making things up that they discredit themselves.
In 1976, Arthur Butz asserted that there were no large deportations of Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz in the spring and summer of 1944. Several other revisionist authors, such as Walter Sanning, repeated this claim. Butz's assertion was based on an inordinately convoluted conspiracy theory about the fabrication of evidence and a misreading of a very indirect source which would hardly be considered decisive by any rational observer.
Fast forward to 2000, and three other revisionists, Carlo Mattogno, Juergen Graf and Samuel Crowell, tell Butz he got it wrong, and accept that there were large deportations of Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz just as is said in all the mainstream history books.
Clearly, in this example, Butz has been outvoted by his fellow revisionists. Butz was wrong. That makes Butz look silly. This makes anyone who cites Butz look silly.
Another Butz gem was claiming that 'New York Zionists' invented the alleged hoax, based on the fact that Butz didn't bother to look any further than the New York Times for reports of the Holocaust during the war, ignoring totally all the material in archives, and especially all the material in Polish, which Butz couldn't read.
Again, Butz was wrong. Clearly the reports of the Holocaust did not originate in New York, but in Europe. This also makes Butz look silly.
Or we can go back to David Hoggan and Richard Harwood, who both repeated a fabricated claim about what was said in the ICRC report on relief efforts, that is so flagrantly wrong that present-day revisionists on CODOH were crestfallen when they realised that these revisionist heroes were lying.
These are the kinds of things that revisionists need to apologise for, and the kinds of booby traps which are created by leaving long debunked, out-dated and just downright wrong claims up on revisionist websites in the shape of books by the likes of Butz, Hoggan and Harwood.
Unfortunately the same process can be repeated for the revisionists of the 80s, 90s and 2000s. That's because deniers tell lies, and because deniers make assertions which turn out to be wrong. Quite how telling lies and making flat-out mistakes helps revisionism is beyond me.
Tell me, Mr. Terry, where are these "steam chambers", "skin lampshades" and "human soap"?
Oh look, another Gish Gallop 'I know you are but what am I' reversal.
Of course, this is more evidence against the ridiculous 'gas chamber' proposal. It shows there would have been widespread rumor of 'gassings' throughout the main camp.
Advanced inverted comma theory doesn't prove they were rumours. Sorry.
How were 2,000 Jews crammed into a relatively tiny gas chamber on a regular basis
Clearly you've never actually read very much about Auschwitz if you repeat such a lame misrepresentation. The extant records show transports arriving at a rate of less than 1 per day, with often 1000 or fewer passengers, of whom typically 20-30% were selected for labour, so that with 2 gas chambers typically operating, each crematoria had to handle a group of maybe 700 victims every other day.
Only from May to July 1944 was the tempo slightly higher, but in this phase you had
five gassing sites to handle approximately 330,000 victims over the course of at least 54 days, which works out at an average of 1,200 per site per day. And quite a few batches revolted.
with apparently flawless precision (by other Jews) if they had already known these buildings were not "showers", as alleged?
As is typical for deniers, you confuse two separate killing processes. New arrivals at Auschwitz would not necessarily have known what was in store, knowledge was only common among victims from Poland because reports spread across the whole of the country by 1943. Thus we find that transports of Polish Jews did on occasion resist, as did others when they realised what was coming next.
Registered camp inmates were only taken to the gas chambers if selected as 'Muselmaenner' or in specific special actions such as the liquidation of the 'Gypsy camp' in August 1944. The 'Muselmaenner' knew exactly what was in store but were too physically weak to do anything about it. The Gypsies fought back when the SS surrounded their sector of the camp to haul them off to the crematoria.
Moreover, why do you regard testimony so highly when these witnesses who would have been predominantly Jewish had overwhelming personal reasons to 'punish' the Germans by whatever means possible?
The Jewish witnesses report the same things as the Polish, Dutch, French, Russian, Ukrainian, German, Austrian and other non-Jewish prisoner witnesses, who report the same things as the SS witnesses.
I think you missed where I said that all the witnesses
irrespective of nationality, ethnicity, religion or political background who were at Auschwitz agreed that it was a site of mass murder.
I'm sure the members at CODOH would love to discuss this with you.
As you're undoubtedly a member of CODOH and EtienneSC is definitely a CODOH member, they are evidently already dicussing this with me. Except you forgot to make a point. Care to try again?
It is not a rare occurence for governments to conspire for private gains. You should be well aware of this as a historian.
There is simply NO EVIDENCE of collusion or contact. You're trying to assert something as fact without having the slightest shred of evidence, simply by appealing to a precedent which doesn't really exist.
The US and USSR had no ideological affinity, and in the postwar period, were becoming fast enemies with the onset of the Cold War. The two powers cooperated at Nuremberg but did so in a hands-off manner. The Soviets simply didn't share their investigative reports en masse with the western Allies. The US didn't find the full set of Einsatzgruppen reports until some time after Nuremberg, in fact not long before things like the Truman Doctrine kicked in. By this stage, neither power was cooperating with even simple issues like war crimes suspect extraditions, whereas the US could manage to do this with Poland and Yugoslavia for a little longer, because those states were not (yet) as paranoid as Stalin's Russia.
Ignoring the onset of the Cold War is an automatic fail when discussing the late 1940s.
Are there authenticated originals of these documents available for review?
What on earth do you think historians have been citing all these years? They're in the sodding archives. Where else would they be?
I really can't help it if you are that unable to follow reference trails in footnotes or endnotes and cannot read history books for comprehension.
Have any of these 'mass graves' been excavated?
Um, why do you think I used the term exhumation/investigative reports? The mass graves were excavated precisely when they should have been, immediately after liberation, by the appropriate authorities, the Soviets, whose land had been invaded and whose citizens had been murdered en masse the length and breadth of the Eastern Front. There are many photographs depicting the results of the exhumations, as can be seen
here.
The point, which you seem to have missed somewhat, is that the US had documents referring to the same events and same killings, whereas the Soviets had the exhumations and eyewitnesses. The two sets of evidence were independent of each other. So it doesn't matter whether the exhumations meet whatever absurd demands you might make of them because they are corroborated by independent evidence.
And please, stop and think before blethering about the wonderful international investigation of Katyn. An international investigation of a mass grave site was conducted precisely once in the first half of the 20th Century and essentially not at all during the Cold War. Was literally nobody other than the victims of Katyn murdered in a mass execution in all that time? Because if an international investigation is needed then no other atrocity can ever be regarded as proven.
Why should the scientific method account for what the "rest of the world" has been convinced of?
Because the scientific method requires that any claim be substantiated and can be 'repeated' by another investigation achieving the same results, as determined by scientific-academic consensus, safeguarded through institutions such as the peer review system and universities.
The fact is that revisionist 'science' hasn't convinced the relevant judges, academics, and has been rejected. Popular rejection is further confirmation that revisionism has not been convincing. The popular rejection is most vividly demonstrated in the US, where despite the First Amendment and a large percentage of the population believing all manner of hogwash, revisionists amount to a few hundred isolated cranks led by an 80-something failed novelist.
By contrast, the evidence for the Holocaust has demonstrably convinced academics and is generally accepted in society. The academics who have been convinced come from all backgrounds and there is a firm international consensus across multiple disciplines about the Holocaust.
Does one have to disprove every religion before it can be regarded as false?
The thousands of academics who regard the Holocaust as a proven historical fact don't think of this fact as a matter of religion. They consider it in terms of evidence.
So, if a revisionist comes along and says all the witnesses are lying, an academic like me wants to know how it was that the witnesses knew what to say. If it is alleged that the witnesses were influenced in specific ways, then evidence of this must be forthcoming. If it is claimed that witnesses were coached or told what to say, then evidence of this must be forthcoming.
Given that the witnesses agree not only with each other but also with other witnesses making statements in demonstrably independent investigations - in effectively a 'double blind' situation - and also agree with things written down in documents which might well have been found by the other side, i.e. again independently, and also agree with photographic evidence, physical evidence and other forms of evidence, then rather a lot of evidence for your conspiracy theory about all the witnesses lying is needed.
Currently, we have a revisionist "hypothesis" that witnesses are all liars. The "hypothesis" hasn't even been tested against all the evidence. It thus remains unproven, and is wildly improbable for the reasons mentioned above.
If however a revisionist comes along and shows in excruciating detail that there really was a conspiracy to fake the 'story' and provides evidence of how this was done, then revisionism would instantly win numerous converts and might be taken seriously instead of being regarded as a sad, sick joke.
If you are making an initial claim, such as a mass German conspiracy to exterminate all Jews, YOU have the burden of proof. This is common sense.
But that burden of proof has been carried long ago. It was carried in the war crimes investigations. It was carried in many thousands of criminal and civil trials in multiple countries with different legal systems. It has been carried with 10s of 1000s of books written on the subject, and 1000s of dissertations defended in oral examinations/viva voces according to the same prevailing standards as any other dissertation in the relevant discipline. It has been carried every time a peer-reviewed article on the subject appears in a scholarly journal.
The burden of proof is not reset to zero because an anonymous internet denier troll says so.
Revisionists don't claim to know exactly what happened during WWII -- they assert that no evidence has been sustained to support an "extermination plan".
And I've been saying that revisionists can assert this until they are blue in the face, they are not only wrong about their assertion, but the "we can't possibly know what really happened" line is fundamentally unconvincing and essentially an admission of intellectual bankruptcy.
That is why revisionism is such a rip-roaring success that its flagship internet forum has accumulated just over 650 members in 10 years. Worldwide.
Clearly, you just want to kick into touch all the inconvenient issues you cannot explain. That's why you resort to Gish Galloping, which goes down like a lead balloon on a skeptics' forum, and that's why you resort to NO U dodges as we've seen repeatedly above.
That's why revisionists run like vampires from crosses whenever someone asks them 'so what did happen to the Jews then?' The collective inability of revisionists to tell us what DID happen instead of what DID NOT happen is the #1 reason why you fail to make more converts
even among those who ignore the fact that deniers are generally a bunch of Hitler-kissing antisemitic conspiraloons.
That's what I'm doing here. I am setting aside the fact that your post contained large dollops of antisemitism, anti-Americanism and pro-Nazi sentiments. I am engaging your belief system as I would any other.
And what I and many others want to know from revisionists are two things:
1) what actually happened
2) how did the world get it so drastically wrong and get hoodwinked.
I and many others want answers to these questions which are detailed, substantiated and convincing. If the answers are detailed, substantiated and convincing then many people would switch sides. If the answers are vague, unsubstantiated and nonsensical then they won't.
It's really as simple as that.
Oh, and please do invite some more CODOH forum members over here. Mild kudos to you, whoever you are, that you showed up. It's been fun. Later.
