Tuesday 25 July 2017

Auschwitz memorial day..some thoughts

Auschwitz memorial day

Saturday was Auschwitz memorial day. Last week I watched the film Denial. It dealt with the libel case brought by Holocaust denier David Erving against Professor Lipstadt, a distinguished academic of the Holocaust.

David Irving is a well know figure on the political right. He is a prominent speaker at far right wing and neo Nazi meetings. The trial led to a destruction of his reputation as a historian and revealed him to be anti Semitic and racist. There is no doubt that the Holocaust happened and yet many deniers of its reality seek to question its very existence be apologists for Hitler and the Nazis.
One must always ask what does anyone gain from a particular position? Irving`s position was by debting the reality of Auschwitz. If he could show that Auschwitz was false he could question the whole of the Nazi Killing machine. Auschwitz was originally built as a prison camp and then later was converted to a concentration camp filled with gas chambers. To the far right Auschwitz seemed a means to deny the systematic madder of six million Jews. To the far right this is a propaganda opportunity

Auschwitz is the most infamous of all Nazi camps, and we commemorate Holocaust Memorial Day on 27 January, the date of its liberation by Soviet troops. Over 1.1 million people were murdered at this site, over 90% of the victims being Jewish.

Auschwitz was a network of several camps, combining forced labour and extermination camps. In late summer 1941 the Nazis began experimenting with a new killing method – a poison gas called Zyklon B. Increasingly larger poison gas chambers were constructed at the camp as the war progressed, after Auschwitz was selected as the main killing site for European Jews – because of its location and access to the rail network. In 1942 Jews from across Europe began to be transported to Auschwitz. The peak of the slaughter occurred in 1944, when more than 400,000 Hungarian Jews were killed in just two months.

Arrival in the camp started with a selection process – men, women and children were removed from the trains and had their valuables taken away. Men were separated from women and children. A Nazi physician would quickly assess whether each person was healthy enough to survive forced labour, and based on this visual inspection, individuals were sent to the camps or to the gas chambers. The disabled, elderly, pregnant women, babies, young children or the sick, stood little chance of surviving this selection.

Those who were selected for death were led to the gas chambers, and, in order to prevent panic, some victims were told they were going to the showers to remove the lice from their bodies. They were made to hand over any remaining valuables and remove all of their clothes. After being ushered into the gas chambers, the doors would be shut and bolted. The poison took up to 20 minutes to kill those in the chambers. Camp prisoners were then forced by the SS guards to remove the corpses from the chambers and to remove hair, gold teeth and fillings. The corpses were then burned in crematoria
tTe deniers say it never happened

Holocaust deniers are people who contend that the Holocaust - the attempt by Nazi Germany to annihilate European Jewry during World War Two - never happened. According to the deniers, the Nazis did not murder six million Jews, the notion of homicidal gas chambers is a myth, and any deaths of Jews that did occur under the Nazis were the result of wartime privations, not of systematic persecution and state-organised mass murder.

Deniers dismiss all assertions that the Holocaust took place as conscious fabrications, or as psychotic delusions. Some even claim that Hitler was the best friend the Jews had in Germany, and that he actively worked to protect them. According to deniers, Jews have perpetrated this hoax about the Holocaust on the world in order to gain political and financial advantage, and it was in fact Germany that was the true victim in World War Two

Documented genocide
Holocaust denial is a form of anti-Semitism, positing that Jews have concocted a giant myth for their own ends. It persists despite the fact that the Holocaust is one of the best documented genocides in history, with a wide array of evidence documenting virtually every aspect of it.
For example, approximately a million Jews on the Eastern Front were shot during 1941-42, and buried in large pits. This is known partly because the Einsatzgruppen, the mobile killing units that coordinated these massacres, prepared detailed reports on the murders - reports that contained precise death tolls, broken down into men, women and children.

These reports were sent to high ranking officials in Berlin, and to army, police and SS officers, as well as diplomats and even prominent industrialists. This wide distribution suggests that the perpetrators felt no shame at what they did. Had these killings not been part of Berlin's policy, the reports would never have been so widely distributed.

Deniers argue that evidence such as this was forged, after the end of World War Two, by people working for world Jewry. They claim that forgers created these and other documents - complete with complex internal reference markings, on typewriters that perfectly matched those used by the various German units said to have written the documents - and then planted thousands of these perfect forgeries in numerous different archival collections (in exactly the right file and in precisely the right sequence) all over Europe.

Not only is such a scenario fantastically improbable, it fails to explain why these supposedly incredibly talented forgers did not succeed in producing the one piece of paper that deniers demand as 'proof' that genocide took place under the Third Reich - an order from Hitler authorising the destruction of the Jews.

David Irving`s books are selling dramatically in America and recently we have seen the rise of new denials of the Holocaust. This is an obscene travesty of the truth....

Last September i had a debate with a member of the alr Right . The individual in question claimed that Hitler was a Socialist and in the debate I demolished  the claim. This claim while not the same as claiming the Holacaust was a fiction..still represents the an attempt on the right to rescue and selectively reframe the Fascism of the 1930s. You can watch the debate on this link. it part of the same process of air brushing History.this is the link

https://rodolfowalshglasses.blogspot.co.uk/2016/10/the-resistible-rise-of-arturo-mackenzie.html

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