Posted By simmons on October 7, 2015
The official story is essentially correct, although the full scale of the crimes is generally not understood, even in the United States (far removed from the events). The basic facts of the Holocaust are also not generally taught in the Arab world (few peoples anywhere learn accurate information about distant genocides).The issues of the State of Israel's behavior toward Arab populations are a separate issue than the Holocaust. Downplaying or denying the Holocaust is a great way to ensure that Israel will not want peace with the Palestinians and other neighboring peoples. Downplaying or denying massacres and injustices on the Arab / Palestinian side since 1948 also makes peace unlikely.
No known limited hang outs.
Most popular descriptions of the Holocaust ignore complicity of the United States and Britain. Churchill and Roosevelt were provided with extremely accurate information about the mass shootings and the extermination camps but chose not to use their propaganda services to warn potential victims to resist or inform civilian populations in Germany about the full extent of Hitler's crimes and threaten post-war prosecution of the perpetrators. Toward the end of the war, a small effort was made to interfere with the conclusion of the "Final Solution," which saved perhaps a quarter million Jews. To its credit, the US Holocaust museum in Washington, DC admits these facts in its displays. The "lessons of the Holocaust" are to watch for the rise of fascism and similar nastiness, and to work to prevent this emergence while it is still possible to stop it (not once the violence is at full strength). Few Holocaust books or movies adequately describe the level of resistance in the Ghettos, Jewish partisans in the forests, and even some of the death camps -- revolts under the most extreme conditions imaginable.The Nazis also killed millions of Poles, communists, Russian civilians and prisoners of war, so-called Gypsies (Roma), political dissidents, Catholics, Jehovah's Witnesses, male homosexuals, psychiatric patients and the infirm, among others. The Nazi war machine killed tens of millions, total, in their quest to take over the world. Some Nazis were exempted from prosecution through secret deals with the Allies. Operation Paperclip smuggled thousands of Nazi criminals into the US to help with the space program and the CIA, others were helped to relocate to South America, where some destablized local governments and helped institute fascism (Chile, Brazil, Argentina, Paraguay).
Some advocates for Holocaust Denial admit that the genocide happened, but claim that it probably was exaggerated in its scope - a subtle, sneaky form of denial. Perhaps some people find it hard to believe how severe these crimes were, but others with this view are merely trying to plant a seed of doubt among those who would not believe claims that it never happened. While the precise number of Jews and non-Jews killed by the Nazis will never be known, the estimates of the number of Jewish victims only vary by a few percent, and not worth arguing about - credible statistics range between 5 and 6 million Jews killed. We will never determine the precise numbers of victims of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Soviet gulag, Tibetan monks murdered by the Chinese, Vietnamese killed by the Americans, Armenian victims of the Turks, Timorese killed by the Indonesians, Guatemalans killed by their military, Cambodians killed by the Khmer Rouge, Rwandan genocide victims, casualties of the ongoing Congo war (millions of dead from war, disease and starvation), student protesters in Tiananmen Square, to cite a few massacres that are well documented without exact casualty lists.
There are many efforts to expose the lies of Holocaust Denial, two of the best websites are
These are excellent analyses that refute the internet era effort to revive Holocaust Denial, which is falsely marketed as "Historical Revisionism" but is really thinly disguised efforts to rehabilitate the image of Nazism. Considering the large amount of nonsense on 9/11 complicity (no planes, etc) that some Holocaust Denial efforts have also promoted, it is possible that some Denial groups are false-flag operations from intelligence services to discredit examination of deep politics. Hopefully, some of their leaders are covert agents and don't actually believe their own lies.
on this page:
related pages:
Israel is a country, Judiaism is a religion.
Israel's genocide of the Palestinians is NOT an excuse for tolerating Holocaust Denial.
The Holocaust is not an excuse for Israeli occupation of Palestine. Gaza has been returned to the Palestinians, but it is under siege by Israeli military forces and has no future without a viable economy, water supplies, and reparations for decades of damage. [note: in late 2008 the Israeli military escalated the low intensity war into a full scale invasion]
Holocaust Deniers do not belong in efforts to expose the 9/11: American Reichstag Fire, not because they are promoting racist nonsense, but also because the Deniers are promoting fake claims of complicity that discredit independent investigations.
holocaust denial is not a neutral topic of historical inquiry, it's a lure cast by Nazi apologists for vulnerably open minds, which exploits their fresh sense of distrust of history by suggesting that this, too, must be a lie. -- Jeff Wells, Rigorous Intuition http://rigorousintuition.blogspot.com/2006/03/inoculations_16.html
"I have to say, I do not consider these people [Holocaust deniers] normal. We have to stick to the truth. There are people denying it, but what happened, happened, and it is not up for dispute." -- SS veteran Oswald Kaduk, who served at Auschwitz http://www.holocaustresearchproject.org/othercamps/kaduk.html
Those who deny Auschwitz would be ready to remake it. -- Primo Levi, survivor of a year's imprisonment in Auschwitz http://www.arifrankel.com/levi18.html
If the Party could reach into the past and say of this or that event "it never happened" surely that was more terrifying than mere torture and death. -- George Orwell, 1984
"The real purpose of Holocaust revisionism is to make National Socialism an acceptable political alternative again." -- Harold Covington, leader of the National Socialist White Peoples Party http://www.nizkor.org/hweb/orgs/american/national-socialist-white-peoples-party/nswpp-on-revisionism.html
Although an exact figure will never be known, approximately 1,500,000 people were murdered by the Einsatzgruppen. The Einsatzgruppen submitted detailed and specific reports of their actions to their superiors both by radio and written communication; these reports were checked against each other for accuracy at Heydrich's headquarters. According to those reports approximately 1,500,000 people were murdered. In evaluating this large number Justice Michael Musmanno, who presided at the trial of the Einsatzgruppen wrote:
One million human corpses is a concept too bizarre and too fantastical for normal mental comprehension. As suggested before, the mention of one million deaths produces no shock at all commensurate with its enormity because to the average brain one million is more a symbol than a quantitative measure. However, if one reads through the reports of the Einsatzgruppen and observes the small numbers getting larger, climbing into ten thousand, tens of thousands, a hundred thousand and beyond, then one can at last believe that this actually happened -- the cold-blooded, premeditated killing of one million human beings.
....
There are some who would try to deny or justify the murders committed by the Einsatzgruppen. The most benign explanation for this denial was given by Justice Michael Musmanno -- an experienced judge and hardened combat veteran -- who presided at the trial of the Einsatzgruppen. Shocked and sickened by the evidence which he heard, Justice Musmanno wrote:
One reads and reads these accounts of which here we can give only a few excerpts and yet there remains the instinct to disbelieve, to question, to doubt. There is less of a mental barrier in accepting the weirdest stories of supernatural phenomena, as for instance, water running up hill and trees with roots reaching toward the sky, than in taking at face value these narratives which go beyond the frontiers of human cruelty and savagery. Only the fact that the reports from which we have quoted came from the pens of men within the accused organizations can the human mind be assured that all this actually happened. The reports and the statements of the defendants themselves verify what otherwise would be dismissed as the product of a disordered imagination. Judgement of the Tribunal, p. 50.
An Introduction to the Einsatzgruppen an essay by Yale F. Edeiken http://www.einsatzgruppenarchives.com/documents/introduction.html
http://screwloosechange.blogspot.com/2006/05/dylan-co-suck-up-to-holocaust-denier.html At 20 May, 2006 09:26, Alex said... What gets me is the sheer...arrogance and horror behind these "revisionists". They cloak themselves in the mantle of "legitimate research" by saying they're not "denying the holocaust" but rather trying to prove that ONLY 2 million died. That's like claiming that Jeffrey Dahmer didn't kill 16 people, but instead ONLY had 7 victims. Frankly, even if you were right, what kind of demented individual would actually WANT to prove that? In the case of Dahmer, it'd have to be either a close family member who still cares about him despite his crimes, or someone who really, REALLY hated his victims. In the case of holocaust deniers, it's quite clear what their agenda is. They can attempt to masquerade it as "legitimate research" all they want, but the way they present their "facts" always destroys any legitemacy behind that claim. There's only two reasons why they'd spend so much effort attempting to revise the historicaly accepted number of Jews (and other minorities) massacred during the holocaust. Either they're neo-nazis trying to clean up the image that they present to the world, or they're anti-semitic assholes who simply hate Jews. There's really no other alternative.
the Ku Klux Klan offers their solidarity to the Holocaust Denial movement
updated on 2008-03-17
The 9/11 truth movement has suffered from some infiltration by advocates of what is euphemistically called Holocaust revisionism, who have written in defense of various aspects of Holocaust Denial and have praised neo-Nazis who seek to downplay the Holocaust.
The 9/11 truth movement has attracted a lot of people who want to be instant experts. Some crave public recognition. Others, no doubt, have their unique psychological reasons, some good, some not so good. But those who make very bold conclusions while being ignorant of most of the available evidence run the risk of "foot in mouth" disease, and worse, their antics can rub off on the rest of us, especially if they seek to connect neo-Nazi pseudo historians and 9/11 truth activists in common cause.
Due to these (and other) efforts to link 9/11 skeptics with Holocaust denial, there are a fair number of citizens who think that 9/11 investigation is really all about blaming "the Jews" for the atrocity, both from those who want to blame the "jews" and those who think that 9/11 investigation is anti-semitism.
Not all "conspiracy theories" are true - some are blatant revisions of history to snare the gullible or those who let their anger get in the way of the facts.
The 9/11 truth movement should not be co-opted by those who want to pretend that one of the greatest crimes in history was oversold by Jews in order to justify a land grab in Palestine.
It would not be surprising if many of the voices most loudly advocating Holocaust Denial were "false flag" operatives of the Israeli government - since the fact that some crazy people promote these lies makes it more difficult to find political space to criticize Israeli human rights abuses (even though the two issues are quite separate). In other words, the spectre of Holocaust Denial is used to discredit legitimate criticism of Israeli crimes -- who benefits is always a useful question to ask.
It is possible that some well-meaning people have been lured into believing Holocaust Denial due to a lack of critical thinking abilities and the fact that much of the best historical material from murdered victims, survivors, bystanders and perpetrators is not on the internet (a failure of only doing research on the web!) and the neo-Nazi liars are aggresive in their advocacy. Fortunately, there is a large amount of material documenting the reality of the Holocaust and refuting the Deniers.
http://www.911review.com/denial/holocaust.html Holocaust Denial Versus 9/11 Truth
http://www.truthmove.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=272 Holocaust Denial and the next 9/11 Conference?
a conference on "9/11 Accountability" planned in Arizona in February 2007 turned out to be organized by a Holocaust denier. Naturally, the media and prominent debunkers have highlighted this situation. The roots of the problem are not this particular event (which is a mix of some good speakers and a lot of absurd nonsense) but the much larger tolerance of Holocaust deniers as credible sources in 9/11 "truth" publications, movies, and even the Deception Dollars.
International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network IJAN
http://www.ijsn.net
Points of Unity
While we all come from diverse organizing and activist experiences, and have diverse relationships to our Jewish histories and identities, we share the following points of unity:
* Solidarity with the struggle for Palestinian self-determination, including full political, economic, cultural, social and land rights for all those living in the historic Palestine, and the right of return for its refugees; * Rejection of the Israeli apartheid state, premised on Jewish supremacy and Zionist ideology, and support for all struggles for legal and economic equality against it; * Support for the building of just societies in historic Palestine, the larger region, and the other places in which we live; * A commitment to the values of democratic self-determination, social justice and solidarity, gender equality and cultural rights, and to assert the same values in our own organizing and political practice; * Commitment to the call from Palestine for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions against Israel; * Challenging the current use of Islamophobia as a strategy for defending and justifying an imperialist US-European agenda; * Challenging white racism, including its manifestations as Ashkenazi racism against Mizrahi Jews; * Challenging the privileging of Jewish voices in conversations and negotiations about Palestine; * Rejection of the ways in which the Zionist movement and Western governments exploit the Nazi holocaust to justify the historic and current actions of the State of Israel; and * Rejection of alliances with anti-Jewish racists, white supremacist and Nazi holocaust deniers in our Palestinian solidarity work.
http://rigint.blogspot.com/2007/01/demon-was-idea-part-one.html
comments posted in response to a person trying to "bait" the list with implicit support for Denial
It doesn't take much investigation to see the issue is owned by fascists, racists and Nazi apologists using disingenuous methods to lure the curious, naive and open minded to their extremes.
The real difficulty lies in exercising both your reason and your intuition in order to assess contrary notions, and then in assimilating the new insight into an expanding, rigorously flexible worldview. Here are two quick examples. ... The other example is this Holocaust Denier Syndrome. The vast majority of us cling resolutely to either the official story or we abandon all reason and march over to the Nazi camp because something bothers us about the well-known narrative. Why is it so difficult to perceive that the official story in this case has been used by both "sides" to their own ends? Is the collaboration between American & German Nazis to kill off Eastern European Jewry and enslave the rest of us somehow easier to stomach than Norman Finkelstein's description of the Holocaust Industry, which, contrary to widespread belief, does not deny the central truth of that event? Just because you're opening your frontal lobes to new invasive paradigms doesn't mean you need to surrender your ability to make distinctions.
Frankly, I don't know why you await the "dollars and cents reasoning," as it is staring you right in the face. The Nazis murdered millions of Jews, as well as Christians, leftists, Communists, Freemasons, Gypsies, homosexuals, etc. etc. etc. All of these people had . . . wait for it . . . property! Yes, that's right, property. Land, companies, stocks, bonds, jewelry, money, houses, factories, shops, buildings, jobs, etc. Before the Nazis murdered the Jews, they passed a bunch of . . . wait for it . . . laws! What did the laws do? Why, like Jim Crow laws, they systematically disenfranchised Jews. The laws economically and socially alienated the Jews from Nazi-controlled German society. This made it easier to murder them. What happened to the Jews during WWII has often been referred to as . . . wait for it . . . liquidation. Where have we heard that term before? Finance? Business. That's right. The Jews were "liquidated" and the Germans got the Jews' stuff. Their houses, their businesses, their jobs, their property, etc. See, the Jews have always been a "model minority." The problem? They're too good at the game. The game of capitalism, or life, that is. Prior to the Nazi ascension, the Jews held a high percentage of positions in law, medicine, and academia. Why did they hold these positions? Could it have anything to do with the fact that Judaism tolerates doctrinal and intellectual dissent, even over sacred texts, and that most Jews had to be fluent in several languages, including one that you have to read backward, Hebrew? Would this be because such cultural traits automatically make one more competitive for positions that require intellectual faculties? I'll let you decide. Anyway, after the disenfranchising laws, they lost these positions. It was a big incentive for intelligent, upwardly mobile, gentile Germans to join the Nazis; they would get to take over those positions earlier, and in greater numbers. Likewise, the gentile businesses saw "opportunities" in that they would get to take over Jewish-controlled business. These were the carrots that the Nazis dangled for the German people. The promise of upward mobility. Plus, if you're a typical gentile, you've been raised to view the Jews as weak, untermenschen. The fact that they succeed in certain areas, at your expense, since its a capitalistic system of winners and losers, is intolerable, since you should win since you've been raised to believe that you're so great. So, you are right. It wasn't just about hate. There were huge financial incentives as well to appeal to the grasping nature of ordinary people. Now, as for the proverbial, "whole truth" about the Holocaust; sure, it was a complicated event. It wasn't black and white. There were Nazis who were ethnically Jewish. There were tens of thousands of German Jews who were given the opportunity to Aryanize into the Germany army because they were deemed politically trustworthy. There was Jewish collaboration via the Judenrat in exterminating Jews, some of it done knowingly to save a select few's hides, and some done unknowingly. And then you have all of the standard fraud and distortion that comes with an event involving millions of people. But none of this changes the fact that the Holocaust was about liquidation and "purification." That's why, if you're a European Jew, and you go back to Europe to see where your grandparents or greatgrandparents used to live, you'll find that there are other people, non-Jews, living in their houses. Just like how the Native Americans look and see non-Native Americans living on the land of their ancestors. We keep them tucked out of sight too. Out of sight, out of mind. All of this information is readily obtained from reviewing the source material.
The deniers are not engaged in a physical destruction. They are engaged in an attempt to pervert the world's memory of how a state almost succeeded in destroying an entire people, along with many others. Currently they are trying to taint the worlds memory of those who were entrapped in this horror. If they succeed at that they will then seek to eradicate any memory of them. This is a "double dying." One hopes to prevent that second dying. It is too late to do anything about the first. Deborah Lipstadt, Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory (Free Press, 1993) http://www.holocaustdenialontrial.org/nsindex.html
http://www.mtsu.edu/~baustin/denhist.htm
A Brief History of Holocaust Denial Ben S. Austin
http://www.nizkor.org/features/techniques-of-denial/ Deceit & Misrepresentation: The Techniques of Holocaust Denial
http://www.nizkor.org/features/revision-or-denial/
http://www.spectacle.org/695/mcvay.html An Interview With Ken McVay (Nizkor)
the best service one can render to those who perished and those who survived, many scarred for life, is to ensure that the facts continue to be published, so that the truth may be preserved. http://www.holocaust-history.org/operation-reinhard/ The Operation Reinhard Extermination Camps by Gord McFee, last modified August 1, 2005
http://www.holocaust-history.org/auschwitz/pressac/technique-and-operation/pressac0011.shtml
AUSCHWITZ: Technique and Operation of the Gas Chambers A systematic study of the delousing and homicidal gas chambers of Bunkers 1 and 2 and of Krematorien I, II, III, IV and V of the former KL Auschwitz Birkenau, and an investigation of the remaining traces of criminal activity. by Jean-Claude Pressac
http://www.holocaust-history.org/auschwitz/pressac/technique-and-operation/pressac0012.shtml
Preface by Beate and Serge KLARSFELD A scientific rebuttal of those who deny the gas chambers
"Those propagandists who seek to rehabilitate Nazism are perfectly aware that what marks it indelibly is the infamous genocide of the Jewish people. They take advantage of the credibility of the public and the more or less unconscious desire of the latter that this nightmarish mass murder had never taken place. That is why the Neo Nazis have during recent years launched an offensive which has had a certain success. Their principal themes are the following: that Hitler was not responsible for the "final solution," that the gas chambers as a means of exterminating the Jews never existed, that the number of Jewish victims has been very considerably exaggerated. "This propaganda is internationally coordinated, and the most virulent of these Neo Nazi publications appear in the major languages."
http://holocaust-history.org/denial-hoax/index.shtml
Holocaust Denial: Truth or Hoax? One Survivor's Testimony by William Samelson, Ph.D. Visiting Professor, Trinity University
The Holocaust is an irrefutable fact. As a survivor of several labor and concentration camps, and as one whose entire family, save my elder brother, was murdered by Nazi thugs, I sincerely wish it had not occurred. It is also irrefutable that I am still here - a reminder of those barbaric acts perpetrated not so long ago on the European Jews by an ostensibly civilized German nation. Law-abiding, ordinary citizens of the Third Reich turned fanatical, implementing their beloved Fhrer's agenda of murder and destruction. They became killers for him and we became the survivors of his madness. We were not expected to remain alive and give testimony to their crimes against humanity. Alas, it can not be denied that I survived this disaster: the most horrendous calamity of the twentieth century. I am here, alive. I represent the tragic truth. It is my belief that I was spared for this purpose. It is now my moral responsibility to bear witness for as long as I shall live, for I am the truth and will not be silenced by lies. To deny the truth, the awful facts of the Holocaust, is simply to lie.
The evidence, of course, is overwhelming. The countless photographs (most of them taken by Nazi SS and military personnel), testimonies of survivors, and Allied liberators as well as from Nazi documentation media and their war-time propaganda films all prove that this mass Judeocide took place. Yet, there are a number of people that claim it was all nothing more than a hoax. These deniers call themselves "revisionist historians." Their express purpose is to alter documented historical fact. In the process, they turn scholarship into mockery, transforming truth into a make-believe fantasy spawned from unmitigated cynicism. They use the resulting misinformation to spread their anti-Jewish beliefs to the general public. Moreover, their theories, derived from blatant fabrication of data, misquotations, and quotations used out of context, are presented under the deceptive mask of scholarship and are made available to the world by way of the Internet, radio, and television. Although only relatively few fringe groups, propagandists, and pseudo-scholars embrace Holocaust denial, their activity is increasing and the potential for their influence to grow is evident. Therefore, it is incumbent upon all Holocaust survivors, historians, and those sincere chroniclers of the Holocaust to inform the world of the truth before the peoples around the world potentially fall prey, over time, to collective amnesia and adopt a romantic mythical view of the past events.
In Mein Kampf (My Struggle), Adolf Hitler expressed his belief that "the great masses of people...more easily fall victim to a big lie than to a little one" (p. 231); and that the simplest ideas "should be repeated thousands of times" so people will remember them (p. 185). Essentially, Holocaust denial is one big, bold, lie. In an attempt to legitimize the Nazi regime, revive National Socialism, forward their theory of a Jewish-Zionist conspiracy and, evidently, justify their virulent anti-Judaism, deniers repeat this lie over and over. They hide their aims under such legitimate-sounding organizations as the "Institute for Historical Review" and the "Committee for Open Debate on the Holocaust." Some deniers have the audacity call themselves "scholars" or "historians." Whichever way they chose to identify themselves, their intentions have nothing to do with the preservation of history but with its distortion. ....
if Holocaust denial is so absurd, why should we bother to research its aims? I believe that in order to separate fact from fiction, it is important to learn about the fiction as well as the facts. As a survivor of the Holocaust, I have experienced the factual consequences of that tragic event at great losses to myself and my family. When I confront the deniers' fictional interpretations of the Holocaust, I can distinguish between them accordingly. Needless to say, there is a large segment of the general public that does not have this advantage. This population will inevitably grow with ignorance, ingrained prejudice or plain naivet. There will always exist people who will be susceptible to the propaganda generated by the deniers of the Holocaust. ....
Historian Michael Sturmer asserts that "in a land without history, the future is controlled by those who determine the content of memory, who coin concepts and interpret the past." Such an assertion is especially applicable to the Holocaust. As we, the survivors, become scarce, there will be fewer sources of primary information about the Holocaust in the world. Furthermore, the essence of truth vested with the authority of the eyewitness, will no longer prevail. They will no longer be able to impress future generations with the horrors of Nazi genocide. It is hard to conceive whether or not the Holocaust denial movement could further its influence. However, it is up to the vigilance of authentic historians and serious scholars to prevent its spread by educating the general public on how to separate fact from fiction and valid historical interpretation from the "revisionist" propaganda. We hope that future generations of discerning individuals will realize that the deniers' diatribes are used not only to discredit the Holocaust victims, but also to tarnish the veracity of eyewitness accounts.
http://www.holocaust-history.org/auschwitz/chemistry/not-the-science/
There are, in fact, people (among whom Rudolf does not number) who deny the Final Solution out of mental illness. Intense emotional issues have an attraction to some people who are a bit on the edge. They could have latched onto any issue and picked the Final Solution by chance. We have nothing but compassion for such people, but that does not mean they deserve to have their viewpoint taken seriously. One must earn the right to be taken seriously. One must demonstrate seriousness in the way that one treats evidence and the context of that evidence.
http://www.holocaust-history.org/revisionism-isnt/ the euphemism of "revisionism" is really Denial
The "Einsatz Gruppen" were "Special Action Groups" that accompanied the German military when it invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941. These Nazi death squads killed over a million Jews and other perceived enemies of Hitler. Most of this mass murder was done through mass shooting at pits near various cities. The Einsatzgruppen also experimented with "mobile gas vans" -- special trucks where the exhaust systems were funneled into a sealed cargo area to kill dozens of people at a time. This technological shift was implemented to spare the perpetrators from the psychological trauma of having to watch each victim die (some of the shooters suffered shock from the blatant crimes they perpetrated in shooting entire populations). The experiments with the gas vans were short lived and led to the construction of the death camps of "Aktion Reinhard" - Treblinka, Sobibor and Belzec, in which perhaps 1.7 million Jews were killed in 1942 and 1943. Those three camps used engine exhausts to fuel their gas chambers. The much better known Auschwitz camp, which was a combination labor camp and death camp, used cyanide gas in its gas chambers to kill over a million people, mostly Jews.
http://www.einsatzgruppenarchives.com/denial/biglie.html Holocaust Denial & The Big Lie
http://www.einsatzgruppenarchives.com/denial/hohd.html Our best defence against this highly offensive "electronic highway litter of hatred" is not to pursue legal redress against the perpetrators, but to focus our resources on ensuring that the facts are as readily accessible as the myths the deniers would have their audience believe.
http://www.einsatzgruppenarchives.com/bauer.html
Julius Bauer, Paul Blobel's driver, described the unloading of a gas van.
The use of the gas vans was the most horrible thing I have ever seen. I saw people being led into the gas vans and the doors closed. Then the van drove off. I had to drive Blobel to the place where the gas van was unloaded. The back doors of the van were opened, and the bodies that had not fallen out when the doors were opened were unloaded by Jews who were still alive. The bodies were covered with vomit and excrement. It was a terrible sight. Blobel looked, then looked away, and we drove off. On such occasions Blobel always drank schnapps, sometimes even in the car.
Kogon, Eugen, Hermann Langbein and Adalbert Ruckerl, ed. Nazi Mass Murder: A Documentary History of the Use of Poison Gas. New Haven: Yale University Press. 1993. p. 61
http://www.einsatzgruppenarchives.com/documents/introduction.html An Introduction to the Einsatzgruppen
There Is No Way to Rationalize and Justify These Crimes
There are some who would try to deny or justify the murders committed by the Einsatzgruppen. The most benign explanation for this denial was given by Justice Michael Musmanno -- an experienced judge and hardened combat veteran -- who presided at the trial of the Einsatzgruppen. Shocked and sickened by the evidence which he heard, Justice Musmanno wrote:
One reads and reads these accounts of which here we can give only a few excerpts and yet there remains the instinct to disbelieve, to question, to doubt. There is less of a mental barrier in accepting the weirdest stories of supernatural phenomena, as for instance, water running up hill and trees with roots reaching toward the sky, than in taking at face value these narratives which go beyond the frontiers of human cruelty and savagery. Only the fact that the reports from which we have quoted came from the pens of men within the accused organizations can the human mind be assured that all this actually happened. The reports and the statements of the defendants themselves verify what otherwise would be dismissed as the product of a disordered imagination. Judgement of the Tribunal, p. 50.
http://www.einsatzgruppenarchives.com/revisionism.html How To Be A Revisionist Scholar (parody)
http://www.kimel.net/sublime.html - subtle forms of Denial (whitewashing the Jewishness of the Holocaust - while millions of non-Jews were killed by the Nazis and their allies, the Jews were the primary targets)
http://www.holocaustchronicle.org
http://www.ushmm.org United States Holocaust Memorial Museum website of national museum in Washington, DC - the permanent exhibit courageously mentions how the US government did very little to slow down the Holocaust, and also shows an IBM punch card tabulator (a prototype computer) of the type used by the Nazis to track down Jews
from the Progressive Review, February 21, 2006
THE REAL HOLOCAUST DENIAL Sam Smith
THE jailing of Holocaust denier David Irving in Austria is a reminder of how easy it is to imitate evil even as one excoriates it. The law that convicted Irving is of the sort the Nazis would have invoked, albeit for far different purposes, and was a routine offense in Orwell's 1984. Many fail to see this irony because they are engaged in the greatest Holocaust denial of all: a refusal to look seriously at why there was a Holocaust in the first place. To blame it all on anti-Semitism is as dangerously ahistorical as to deny its existence. Yes, Jews were the victims, but why did an ancient and widespread prejudice produce such an extreme result in this case?
We avoid this question because it takes us places we don't want to go. Like the role of modern bureaucracy and technology in the magnification of evil. Like the commingling of corporate and state interests in a way the world had never seen before. Like the failure of Germany's liberal elite to stand effectively against wrong eerily echoed today in the failure of America's liberal elite to do likewise.
Some of the most important lessons of the Holocaust are simply missed. Among these, as Richard Rubenstein has pointed out, is that it could only have been carried out by an advanced political community with a highly trained, tightly disciplined police and civil service bureaucracy.
In The Cunning of History, Rubenstein also finds uncomfortable parallels between the Nazis and their opponents. For example, a Hungarian Jewish emissary meets with Lord Moyne, the British High Commissioner in Egypt in 1944 and suggests that the Nazis might be willing to save one million Hungarian Jews in return for military supplies. Lord Moynes reply: What shall I do with those million Jews? Where shall I put them? Writes Rubenstein: "The British government was by no means adverse to the final solution as long as the Germans did most of the work. " For both countries, it had become a bureaucratic problem, one that Rubenstein suggests we understand as the expression of some of the most profound tendencies of Western civilization in the 20th century.
How many school children are taught that, worldwide, wars in the past century killed over 100 million people? In World War I alone, the death toll was around ten million. Much of this, including the Holocaust, was driven by a culture of modernity that so changed the power of institutions over the individual that the latter would become what Erich Fromm called homo mechanicus, attracted to all that is mechanical and inclined against all that is alive. Becoming, in fact, a part of the machinery -- willing to kill or to die just to keep it running.
Thus, with Auschwitzlike efficiency, over 6,000 people perished every day during World War I for 1,500 days. Rubenstein recounts that on the first day of the Battle of the Somme, the British lost 60,000 men and half of the officers assigned to them. But the bureaucratic internal logic of the war did not falter at all; over the next six months, more than a million British, French and German soldiers would lose their lives. The total British advance: six miles. No one in that war was a person anymore. The seeds of the Holocaust can thus be found in the trenches of World War I. Individuals had became no better than the bullets that killed them, just part of the expendable arsenal of the state. But we don't talk about this do we? We don't teach our children about it, do we?
The problem with using the outcome rather than the origins of the Holocaust as our metaphor and our message is that we are totally unprepared for those practices, laws, and arguments that can produce similar outcomes. We study the death chambers when we should be learning about the birth places.
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