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Who Was The First Holocaust Denier?

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uke2se said:
I wouldn't really call that holocaust denial. As the guy said, it was an in-joke - a terribly distasteful and horrific in-joke. The nutzies we're dealing with today on these forums have managed to suspend reality in favor of political dogma - more like Hitler at the very end of the war.
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What Rosenbaum said in the clip was that der Führer was putting the first instance of Holocaust denial "on the record." Interesting that Hitler's full recorded statement as quoted was exactly what David Irving was saying before he went into full-bore denial mode.
 
Most likely, Paul Rassinier.

From his WIKI page.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Rassinier

By 1948, Paul Rassinier had been a history teacher for over twenty-two years, and was distressed to read stories about the concentration camps and deportations that he claimed were not true. He was also appalled at the unilateral condemnation of Nazi Germany for crimes against humanity that from his experience in Morocco, he didn't consider unique, and feared that nationalistic hatreds and bitterness would divide Europe. As he explained it in The Lie of Ulysses:

...one day I realized that a false picture of the German camps had been created and that the problem of the concentration camps was a universal one, not just one that could be disposed of by placing it on the doorstep of the National Socialists. The deportees—many of whom were Communists—had been largely responsible for leading international political thinking to such an erroneous conclusion. I suddenly felt that by remaining silent I was an accomplice to a dangerous influence.

Rassinier's first book, Crossing the Line (1949), an account of his experience in Buchenwald, was an immediate critical and commercial success, one reviewer describing it as "the first testimony coldly and calmly written against the demands of resentment, idiotic hatred or chauvinism". The Trade Union of Journalists and Writers also praised it, and it was recommended reading by the SFIO. It is notable for its criticism of the prisoner government. Rassinier claims that effective resistance was found only among the Russian prisoners, and that many brutalities in the camp were committed not by the S.S., but by the mainly Communist prisoners who took over the Haftlingsfuhrung and ran the internal affairs of the camps for their own benefit. Rassinier blamed the high death rate at the two camps he saw on their corruption.
 
Revdude said:
Most likely, Paul Rassinier.
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While Rassinier was the first influential "revisionist," he did have these two predecessors who apparently attracted little attention.

The first proponent of true Holocaust denial may have Alexander Ratcliffe, a Scottish politician who claimed in late 1945 in his magazine Vanguard, that the Holocaust was a Jewish invention. This statement was taken from The Truth About the Jews, a pamphlet Ratcliffe had published earlier in which he also speculated that the British government was actually controlled by the Jews.

In 1947 a prominent French fascist named Maurice Bardeche began attacking Allied war propaganda, while at the same time defending the Nazis. Bardeche claimed in his second book, Nuremberg or the Promised Land, that at least part of the evidence surrounding the concentration camps had been falsified and that the deaths of those interred there were mainly due to starvation and illness. He also argued that the Jews were to blame for their fate because they supported the Treaty of Versailles and therefore helped to instigate the war. Bardeche was also the first to contend that no Jews were gassed, because the gas chambers were used for disinfection.

http://homepages.ius.edu/RVEST/HolocaustDenial.html
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I think the case can be made, however, that the first Holocaust deniers were the perpetrators, the Nazis themselves, with their coded language of "removal, relocation, eradication", ect. The term "the final solution to Jewish question" was itself an obscene euphemism.
 
uke2se said:
They didn't really deny the facts of the holocaust. They just claimed they had no responsibility for it.
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But apparently they were tortured by having their tummies tickled and forced to listen to Vera Lynn recordings
 
Walter Ego said:
I think the case can be made, however, that the first Holocaust deniers were the perpetrators, the Nazis themselves, with their coded language of "removal, relocation, eradication", ect. The term "the final solution to Jewish question" was itself an obscene euphemism.
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Ah yes, the coded words and euphemisms. Funny how nobody can explain how the Allies figured out what all the coded words and euphemisms really meant, or how they developed in Nazi Germany, or when the meaning of words changed from benign to sinister, or how people learned about the new meaning of the words without everybody finding out and defeating the original purpose of the coded language, or who decided which words would be given new meaning, or.......
 
Dogzilla said:
Ah yes, the coded words and euphemisms. Funny how nobody can explain how the Allies figured out what all the coded words and euphemisms really meant, or how they developed in Nazi Germany, or when the meaning of words changed from benign to sinister, or how people learned about the new meaning of the words without everybody finding out and defeating the original purpose of the coded language, or who decided which words would be given new meaning, or.......
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No, it's not funny, it's sad how your own willful ignorance is supposed to change recorded (literally, in this case) history...
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TSR said:
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No, it's not funny, it's sad how your own willful ignorance is supposed to change recorded (literally, in this case) history...
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Thanks for the link. I was unaware of the 1943 Posen Conference. From one of Himmler's speeches:

Himmler then explicitly speaks of the genocide of the Jews, something which had not been previously done by a representative of the Nazi party up until this point:

I am now referring to the evacuation of the Jews, the extermination of the Jewish people. It's one of those things that is easily said: 'The Jewish people are being exterminated', says every party member, 'this is very obvious, it's in our program, elimination of the Jews, extermination, we're doing it, hah, a small matter.' [...] But of all those who talk this way, none had observed it, none had endured it. Most of you here know what it means when 100 corpses lie next to each other, when 500 lie there or when 1,000 are lined up. To have endured this and at the same time to have remained a decent person - with exceptions due to human weaknesses - had made us tough. This is a page of glory never mentioned and never to be mentioned. [...] We have the moral right, we had the duty to our people to do it, to kill this people who wanted to kill us.
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"Evacuation" was always a euphemism for extermination. The evacuation policy was codified at the earlier Wannsee Conference (January 1942) at which the German govenmental bureaucracy was made complicit in what was already being done. (A 2001 HBO/BBC dramatic recreation of the Wannsee Conference starring Kenneth Branagh and Stanley Tucci can be viewed here click "play all).

Although explicit references to mass killings were not included in the sanitized minutes of this conference prepared by Adolf Eichmann, no one in attendance was under any illusion about what they were agreeing to, as Eichmann later made clear in his testimony at his war crimes trial in Israel.

Eichmann told his questioners that towards the end of the meeting cognac was served, and that after that the conversation became less restrained.[37] "The gentlemen were standing together, or sitting together", he said, "and were discussing the subject quite bluntly, quite differently from the language which I had to use later in the record. During the conversation they minced no words about it at all...they spoke about methods of killing, about liquidation, about extermination".
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So may we conclude that the Holocaust was a Nazi conspiracy to exterminate, by whatever means necessary, the entire Jewish population of Europe?

 
TSR said:
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No, it's not funny, it's sad how your own willful ignorance is supposed to change recorded (literally, in this case) history...
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There is also the affidavit of Hoss from the Nuremberg trials.

http://www.historyplace.com/worldwar2/holocaust/h-hoess.htm

"The 'Final Solution' of the Jewish question meant the complete extermination of all Jews in Europe.
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Dogzilla likes to pretend these things don't exist but they do and I for one will keep reminding him of it
 
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