[starman2003]

Mass escapes?

A subsequent manhunt got many.

Ya know people...I am beginning to have this sinking feeling that perhaps the "6,000,000" number is also rather grossly over-estimated...

Exhaustive studies have come up with a grand total of about 5.7 million. I don't think it's very helpful to question the extent of the holocaust. I suggest we just question the inordinate focus on it. Previously I asked: What if 6 million people were killed several decades ago in exactly the same way(s) in some obscure region in subsaharan Africa. How much media attention would that have gotten over the years, compared to the jewish holocaust? One ten thousanth of one percent?

[Buzz62]

Starman I agree that the focus on the Holocaust is somewhat more publicized that the unspeakable atrocities that have happened in Africa.
I think the reasons for this are obvious...and numerous.
Not the least of which is money.

Yet I have to disagree that we should not question the numbers.
It appears they are "fudged".
It appears they have been over-blow in order to cause a desired effect.
It also appears that in doing so, the perpetrators of this "little fib" may have provided the very ammo needed for those who wish to cast a shadow on the entire event.

[Wrath_014]

http://www.yadvashem.org/yv/en/about/in ... /index.asp

I advise you to have a look in this site.

Yet I have to disagree that we should not question the numbers.
It appears they are "fudged".

http://www.yadvashem.org/yv/en/about/ev ... zation.pdf
http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jso ... table.html
http://www.yadvashem.org/yv/en/holocaus ... /index.asp - Go to "Final Solution"
http://www.yadvashem.org/yv/en/holocaus ... ?gate=2-32

Another improvement we made over Treblinka was that we built our gas chambers to accommodate 2,000 people at one time, whereas at Treblinka their 10 gas chambers only accommodated 200 people each. The way we selected our victims was as follows: we had two SS doctors on duty at Auschwitz to examine the incoming transports of prisoners. The prisoners would be marched by one of the doctors who would make spot decisions as they walked by. Those who were fit for work were sent into the Camp. Others were sent immediately to the extermination plants. Children of tender years were invariably exterminated, since by reason of their youth they were unable to work. Still another improvement we made over Treblinka was that at Treblinka the victims almost always knew that they were to be exterminated and at Auschwitz we endeavored to fool the victims into thinking that they were to go through a delousing process. Of course, frequently they realized our true intentions and we sometimes had riots and difficulties due to that fact. Very frequently women would hide their children under the clothes but of course when we found them we would send the children in to be exterminated. We were required to carry out these exterminations in secrecy but of course the foul and nauseating stench from the continuous burning of bodies permeated the entire area and all of the people living in the surrounding communities knew that exterminations were going on at Auschwitz.

— Rudolf Höß, Auschwitz camp commandant, Nuremberg testimony

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Holoca ... ass_murder

2000 people at once.
7 Gas chambers, Plus 2 more.

In addition to all other Gas chambers which were in almost every camp...

At Auschwitz seven buildings existed which were used as gas chambers. In addition, two other sites were also used as gas chambers but only for a few gassing actions: the cellar of Block 11 in the Stammlager, where the first test gassings were carried out in August 1941, and a delousing barrack at the Main Economic Area near the Stammlager, called "Kanada I", where 200 members of the Sonderkommando were killed with "Zyklon B" gas on 23 September 1944.

[danholo]

Ah, yet another thread to trivialize the Holocaust, a terror produced by the most civilized continent in the world. I don't find the gas chamber issue much of an exaggeration at all. It is well known that many were killed before them. The mass shootings are even more horrific if you ask me. People lined up in front of mass graves to be shot on the previously shot who are either dead or bleeding to death under a pile of bodies. The gas chambers are merely an example of how far the Nazis were willing to go to rid Europe of its Jews because previous methods weren't fast enough. To trivialize this is to trivialize and downplay every other genocide in the world, which are clearly shrugged off even on this board. I mean, it happens all the time so it's a mere statistic, right? It's sad that the Holocaust is the only one that gets so much publicity. This thread itself is meant to downplay its effect and meaning. It shows how much people care about genocide and assume that publicizing and talking about it is exaggerated propaganda. Hello? Millions were murdered and this is what yet more civilized people are presenting? The Holocaust is the perfect case study of genocide to focus on because it was documented so well. Other victims of genocide weren't so lucky but nobody cares anyway.

[Smilin' Dave]

Buzz62, the questions you've chosen to repeat verbatim are pretty misleading. And your own follow up questions aren't much better.

Look at the blueprints of Auschwitz. Could 2,000 people really have fit into that "gas chamber"?

Where was the figure of 2,000 per gassing taken from out of interest? I can't recall it being mentioned in past. I'm guessing that it's based on some quick math based on total deaths or something... which isn't really an accurate measure.

Look at the poor design of the Auschwitz "killing center", first they take their clothes off, then walk through a narrow isle into the "gas chamber", then they die. So after that they have to be cremated. The ovens are on the second story. They have to take the dead bodies up on an elevator (slow process). Then they cremate them, which takes a very, very long time. Consider that Auschwitz wasn't functioning for very long.

Auschwitz wasn't purpose built as a killing centre so in a way inefficiencies in the design shouldn't be a surprise. Other subsequently built facilities had different layouts which were presumably more efficient.

According to "eyewitnesses" there were only 4 Germans monitoring the process and about 100 Jews doing the dirty work. There were 2,000 people about to be killed and thousands more in the living quarters. The "death center" wasn't fenced around, it was open and in direct sight of people in the living quarters. Don't you think they would have rebelled against 4 puny guards?

- I'm pretty sure I've seen a fence around the gas chambers, though can't specifically recall re. Auschwitz. In purpose the Aktion Reinhardt camps the whole path from the railway station to the chamber was covered.
- Lets not forget the chambers were apparently operated under the fiction that they were shower blocks or for delousing. The victims may not have all realised they were going to die until it was far too late.
- The victims would have been in pretty bad condition to begin with, and may not have had much fight left in them.
- Your average prison guard is heavily outnumbered too, but somehow manage to do their job (most of the time).
- As starman2003 notes, there were mass escapes and similar.

According to "eyewitnesses" 90% of Jews coming from being captured in cities were directly sent to the "gas chambers" . So, they weren't starving, they had just been out on the streets living life and may actually have been strong. They could have easily rebelled.

I'm curious who this eyewitness is. Most Jews seem to have been ghettoised first or at least otherwise brought and held at a central location first. I think the hardships of the trip to the camps shouldn't be underestimated either - it's not like they were taking first class carriages.

If they were going to kill them, why would Germans make living quarters? Why would Himmler order that more living quarters be built?

At the Aktion Reinhardt camps, there weren't sufficient living quarters - considerably more people arrived at those camps that could have been housed. I'm suspicious about the Himmler thing, I've seen denialists point to construction intended for the guards etc. before and then claiming it was actually meant for prisoners. It may also have been problem of inefficiency - many of the complexes were not actually keeping up with 'demand'.

Why wouldn't they just fill up the place with "gas chambers" so they could kill more people quicker?

Because there were other bottlenecks to resolve. There were for example shortages of Xyklon-B. The crematoria couldn't always keep up, and as Xbow notes, some were redesigned. And as the guy asking these questions noted before, there was a limit on how many people were available to 'run' the chambers.

Why would they make a soccer field for people they were going to kill?

- This is the kind of claim I've seen in past that ended up being misrepresentation.
- It's worth remembering that not everyone who went to Auschwitz was slated to be killed. There were factories there and some minor allowances may have been made for the workers (I'm guessing we aren't talking about a stadium here...).
- Based on the known limited calory intake of the inmates, why does the person asking these questions really think the prisoners were in any condition to play sports?

Why were they trying to negotiate with Great Britain to make a Jewish Homeland in Palestine? Why would they try to make a Jewish homeland in Madagascar?

Because the genocidal policy didn't emerge fully formed in 1933, or even in 1939. Both of the initiatives mentioned were prior to the Wansee Conference, which by all accounts was when that policy was finally ironed out and presented coherently.

Ya know people...I am beginning to have this sinking feeling that perhaps the "6,000,000" number is also rather grossly over-estimated...

It's actually held up reasonably well. We're never going to know exactly down to the last digit how many people were killed off. This was a broad policy that spanned huge stretches of Europe, involved multiple nations and political groups, sometimes occurred in the aftermath of battles (ie. the Einsatzgruppen on the Eastern Front) etc. etc. Just how realistic do you think it is to expect an exact number when they probably didn't do exhaustive head counts every time, and to the same standards, perhaps not always submitting a detailed report etc.?

I think the reasons for this are obvious...and numerous.
Not the least of which is money.

Perhaps more importantly - people of European descent are hugely fixated on a cataclysmic event that took place in Europe, and targetting a European population. It shouldn't surprise you much that outside of Europe etc., the perception of the Holocaust is quite different. This explanation also goes some way to explaining why the Armenian Genocide is still remembered, despite the Armenians not exactly fitting the stereotype of being over represented in media etc.

It appears they are "fudged".

Let's turn the tables for a change, take your inquisitor's hat off for a tic - where do you think the numbers originally came from, and if you think they are wrong what do you think is more reasonable and why?

I guess being exterminated by exotic chemical agents makes better news stories than being starved and worked to death.

A nitpick - Xyklon-B while sounding exotic really wasn't at the time - it was a widely available fumigation product used in industry. Other gas chambers were reported to have been 'powered' by tank engines, and carbon monoxide isn't really all that exotic at all.

The practical reason/s why the gas chambers get all the attention:
- They're prove of deliberate extermination. Death by slave labour could be 'unintended' (though as you note, it clearly wasn't).
- It was relatively speaking unusual, exceptional. History is full of genocides and attempted genocide by starvation, slavery etc. Gas chambers are novel.
- Gas chambers are modern, and may even have a certain perverse appeal to people interested in the engineering side of things (the likes of Fred Leuchter for example might fit into this bracket).

[Quercus Robur]

There's some interesting historical speculation over Auschwitz in particular due to the way it was handled post war. Reconstructing the buildings... not so good for history.

David Irving is a good speaker and (from the limited amount I can discern) a surprisingly good historian; he presents the alternative view of the holocaust in a fairly grounded way (ignore the agenda of some of the forums he speaks in, and the occasional absurdity; he's as clumsy a politician as he is a good historian).

As a proviso I suppose I better say that I don't deny the applicability of the term holocaust to what happened to the Jews, and don't argue that "decimating an entire captive population you've systematically rendered helpless and starved due to insane racial ideology" is equivalent to "decimating a civilian population by aerial bombing of civilian towns with incendiaries".

[Ter]

David Irving is a good speaker and (from the limited amount I can discern) a surprisingly good historian

from the Wikipedia, with my bolding:

David John Cawdell Irving (born 24 March 1938) is an English writer and Holocaust denier] who specialises in the military and political history of World War II, with a focus on Nazi Germany. He is the author of 30 books on the subject, including The Destruction of Dresden (1963), Hitler's War (1977), Uprising! (1981), Churchill's War (1987), and Goebbels: Mastermind of the Third Reich (1996).

His work on Nazi Germany became controversial because of [b]his sympathy for the Third Reich, antisemitism and racism.[/b] He has associated with far right and neo-Nazi causes, famously during his student days seconding British Union of Fascists founder Oswald Mosley in a University College London debate on immigration. He has been described as "the most skillful preacher of Holocaust denial in the world today".

Irving's reputation as an historian was widely discredited after he brought an unsuccessful libel case against the American historian Deborah Lipstadt and Penguin Books.[4] The English court found that Irving was an active Holocaust denier, antisemite, and racist, who "associates with right-wing extremists who promote neo-Nazism", and that he had "for his own ideological reasons persistently and deliberately misrepresented and manipulated historical evidence".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Irving

Hmm, not exactly a good historian.

[Decky]

Me and about 40 comrades picketed somewhere he was meant to speak in Birmingham and got his talk cancelled. He and all the racist scum who had came to hear him had to get right back on their trains.

That was a good day, free speech died and good prevailed.

[Quercus Robur]

David John Cawdell Irving (born 24 March 1938) is an English writer and Holocaust denier] who specialises in the military and political history of World War II, with a focus on Nazi Germany. He is the author of 30 books on the subject, including The Destruction of Dresden (1963), Hitler's War (1977), Uprising! (1981), Churchill's War (1987), and Goebbels: Mastermind of the Third Reich (1996).

His work on Nazi Germany became controversial because of [b]his sympathy for the Third Reich, antisemitism and racism.[/b] He has associated with far right and neo-Nazi causes, famously during his student days seconding British Union of Fascists founder Oswald Mosley in a University College London debate on immigration. He has been described as "the most skillful preacher of Holocaust denial in the world today".

Irving's reputation as an historian was widely discredited after he brought an unsuccessful libel case against the American historian Deborah Lipstadt and Penguin Books.[4] The English court found that Irving was an active Holocaust denier, antisemite, and racist, who "associates with right-wing extremists who promote neo-Nazism", and that he had "for his own ideological reasons persistently and deliberately misrepresented and manipulated historical evidence".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Irving

Hmm, not exactly a good historian.

well maybe, but I think there need to be better criticisms of him as a historian than being a racist etc; perhaps particular instances of claims by him which are silly and betray the ignorance associated with racism anti-semitism and 'being-a-bit-of-a-Nazi-ism' rather than just him being an offensive character. Incidentally, just to reiterate to the OP etc, he can be pretty abrasive, although his language on race is tempered simply because he's not a politician trying to argue anything much in the main, but a guy who's very very interested in the third Reich and WWII.

The trial claim is more serious. The claim in that trial was that he exaggerated in places, not that he was an outright liar, and I think he lost the his claim because the judge went with the reasonable view of most academics about the holocaust when Irving is obviously a revisionist historian with whom most academics wouldn't agree. I wouldn't mind looking up that judgment properly though.

Me and about 40 comrades picketed somewhere he was meant to speak in Birmingham and got his talk cancelled. He and all the racist scum who had came to hear him had to get right back on their trains.

That was a good day, free speech died and good prevailed.

What was he talking about?

[Buzz62]

Ah, yet another thread to trivialize the Holocaust, a terror produced by the most civilized continent in the world. I don't find the gas chamber issue much of an exaggeration at all. It is well known that many were killed before them. The mass shootings are even more horrific if you ask me. People lined up in front of mass graves to be shot on the previously shot who are either dead or bleeding to death under a pile of bodies. The gas chambers are merely an example of how far the Nazis were willing to go to rid Europe of its Jews because previous methods weren't fast enough. To trivialize this is to trivialize and downplay every other genocide in the world, which are clearly shrugged off even on this board. I mean, it happens all the time so it's a mere statistic, right? It's sad that the Holocaust is the only one that gets so much publicity. This thread itself is meant to downplay its effect and meaning. It shows how much people care about genocide and assume that publicizing and talking about it is exaggerated propaganda. Hello? Millions were murdered and this is what yet more civilized people are presenting? The Holocaust is the perfect case study of genocide to focus on because it was documented so well. Other victims of genocide weren't so lucky but nobody cares anyway.

Thanks Dan...we all think attempted genocide is indeed a bad thing.
However that is not an excuse to halt pursuance of the facts.

Quercus Robur: I watched that David Irving clip and found it interesting.
I also find it interesting that he can claim to be purely interested in science and not anti-anything all he likes, and the method for "debunking" his work is to howl "ANTI-SEMITE" from the roof tops.
The one argument I found compelling is the samples of the brick work at the gas chambers.
I've seen people dismiss this saying that 50 years of rain and weather eroded any evidence...but then why did the cloths de-louser chamber show such high results?

There is something very wrong about all of this.
The numbers don't fit with the claims.
The methods promoted and touted (gas chambers) don't have the capacity to have executed so many people.
The arguments AGAINST those who question are automatically and uniformly the same..."ANTI-SEMITE".

Ya know...when 2 opposing view-points collide in a debate, what is generally found is that the absolute truth of the matter is somewhere in the middle of the 2 view-points. Knowing this...we can rather safely say that the Holocaust was a horrific event that should never happen again...although it has and does with scary regularity in poorer, less publicized nations...but that the "publicized" methods and numbers are probably not as accurate as we have been lead to believe. That "liberties" were taken for "theatrical effect. Likewise the same can be said of the opposing side of this debate. Both sides have taken "liberties" in order to help prop-up their arguments. One's as bad as the other.

REAL peace does not live at the end of a shotgun. Nor will it blossom in a field of lies.
For as much as it's time the denier camp come clean with their misrepresentations, it is also past due that the Zionist camp own-up to their own misrepresentations.

Finally...thank you Xbow...for being level-headed enough to NOT mistake curiosity for ANTI-anything.

[Quercus Robur]

Thanks for giving Irving a chance at least, and glad you found it informative even if you disagree with everything he says (especially on this topic!) you would think he's got to be up there with the best historians on WWII just on the back of his sources.

Incidentally to quote people you might want to use the quote function - it is neater:

Code: Select all[quote="Quercus Robur"]Incidentally to quote people you might want to use the quote function - it is neater[/quote]

becomes:

Incidentally to quote people you might want to use the quote function - it is neater

[Buzz62]

Me and about 40 comrades picketed somewhere he was meant to speak in Birmingham and got his talk cancelled. He and all the racist scum who had came to hear him had to get right back on their trains.

That was a good day, free speech died and good prevailed.

BTW...I find this disturbing.
Especially this sentiment:

That was a good day, free speech died and good prevailed.

[Decky]

What was he talking about?

Fuck if I know, racists don't have the right to talk about anything, I didn't check what the talk was on I just got to the picket when the orders came down from the party to mobalise just as I would if it had asked anything from me.

ours is not to question why ours is but to do or die

Probably holocaust denial or there wouldn't have been controversy.

BTW...I find this disturbing.
Especially this sentiment:

Why's that? Are you a big fan of holocaust denial aka free speech?

[Buzz62]

I find it disturbing that free speech seems like a good idea...until someone says something you don't like.
Welcome to the Free World Decky.
If that doesn't suit ya...I understand Cuba needs immigrants...

[Decky]

I find it disturbing that free speech seems like a good idea...until someone says something you don't like.

What?



I've never thought free speech was a good idea.

[Buzz62]

Oh...well in that case I'm sure you'll just love Cuba.

[Decky]

If I was going to defect I would go for Belarus. I hate hot weather.

[Buzz62]

I think Belarus is free now.
But who knows...I certainly don't for sure...

And you aversion to free speech is rather evident...

Fuck if I know, racists don't have the right to talk about anything

But Ducky...free speech is certainly not equivalent to racism or Holocaust denial.
It is the right to speak your mind.
Something we have enjoyed for a couple centuries now.
It's what makes it possible for people to say asinine crap like...

Fuck if I know, racists don't have the right to talk about anything

EDIT: Excuse me...Decky...not Ducky...sorry.

[Decky]

I think Belarus is free now.

It is free yes. Run by a Stalinist strong man.

[feihua]

This thread has taken a very interesting turn.

it is also past due that the Zionist camp own-up to their own misrepresentations.

The attitude for knowledge looks more like an agenda has been given breathing room and one is not covering their bases as before.