The Holocaust happened. .the cowerd only attacks when he feels secure...
"Every age has its own fascism."
- Primo Levi, survivor of Auschwitz
The film" Denial" on Saturday about David Irvings libeal case agaibst Professor Lipstadt concerning the holacaust. It depresses ne when i still come across anti Semetic posts. I have seen on local Facebook pages absolute ignorance and have seen a more disturbed trend where old conspiracy theories about " World Finance" and the Rothschild are reheated conspiracies that go back to the " Protocols of the Elders of Zion" There are many eho fail to understand of course between being anti Zionist and anti Semetic and President Trumps actions over Jerusalem will confuse others even more...
Only a year ago I was forced to debate with a young man on the premise he made that Hitler was a Socialist. While the young man in question is not anti semetic..his premise fed into this rehabilitation of Hitler dicourse that feeds more subtely into this alt right agenda....for those interewsted here ius the link for the debate.....https://rodolfowalshglasses.blogspot.co.uk/2016/10/the-resistible-rise-of-arturo-mackenzie.html
Just recently i saw a post from someone who had a Polish surname going on about the Rothschuild conspiracy. He had no idea that he had fallen for a far right agenda and seemed ignorant of the fate of the vast Jewish population of Eastern Europe. Those who know no history are deemed to repeat it. So I am forced to provide a long detailed piece on the stupidity and malice of the deniers. If they can take down the holacaust and say there is room to challenge its existence they build an agenda that is a nightmare.
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 semtic and racist. There is no doubt that the Holacaust happened and yet many demiers of its reality seek to question its very existence.and be apologists for Hitler and the Nazis.
One must always ask what does anyone gain from a particular position? Irvings position was by debting the reality of auswitz. If he couls show that Austwitz was false he could question the whole of the nazi Killing nachine. Auswitz was originally built as a prison camp and then later was cobverted to a concentration camp filled with gas chambers. Yo the far right auswitx seemed a meabs to deby the sydtematic mudder of six million jews. To the far right this is a propganda oppurtinity
Auschwitz-Birkenau 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-Birkenau 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-Birkenau. 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
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 Irvings books are selling dramatically in America and recently we have seeb the rise of new denials of the Holacaust. Recently social media is awash with claims suggesting that bot iomly was Hitler was unawere of the
The Holocaust happened. .the cowerd only threatened when he feels secure
It is a fact that some six million European Jews were systematically murdered by Nazi Germany and its collaborators between 1941 and 1945 in a state-sponsored program of genocide.
The National Socialists came to power in part by convincing Germans that many of the country’s problems were caused by its Jewish minority, whom they labeled an “inferior race” and depicted as depraved and animal-like in anti-Semitic propaganda. They named their plan for exterminating the Jews the “Final Solution.” Their implementation of a plan to exterminate the Jews — the “Final Solution,” they called it — has been well documented, starting with the 3,000 tons of confiscated of Third Reich paperwork presented in evidence at the Nuremberg trials immediately after the war.
Yet, despite universal agreement among historians about all of the above (“No serious historian questions that the Holocaust took place,” the American Historical Association affirmed in a 1991 statement), there exists a tiny but vocal group of naysayers — conspiracy theorists, actually, given that they claim that “Jewish-controlled” academic and media institutions “invented” the Holocaust — whose mission it is to sow doubt that the genocide of European Jews ever happened. They are known (to everyone but themselves) as Holocaust deniers.
Here are some basic tenets of Holocaust denialism (via the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum):
“Holocaust denial” describes attempts to negate the established facts of the Nazi genocide of European Jewry. Common denial assertions are: that the murder of six million Jews during World War II never occurred; that the Nazis had no official policy or intention to exterminate the Jews; and that the poison gas chambers in Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp never existed.
A newer trend is the distortion of the facts of the Holocaust. Common distortions include, for example, assertions that: the figure of six million Jewish deaths is an exaggeration; deaths in the concentration camps were the results of disease or starvation but not policy; and that the diary of Anne Frank is a forgery.
The deniers aren’t known for their subtlety. “I don’t see any reason to be tasteful about Auschwitz,” saidauthor, anti-Semite, and Holocaust denier David Irving in 1991. He continued:
It’s baloney, it’s a legend. Once we admit the fact that it was a brutal slave labor camp and large numbers of people did die, as large numbers of innocent people died elsewhere in the War, why believe the rest of the baloney?
I say quite tastelessly, in fact, that more women died on the back seat of Edward Kennedy’s car at Chappaquiddick than ever died in a gas chamber in Auschwitz.
At a 2006 conference of Holocaust deniers in Iran hosted by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the country’s former interior minister said, without irony, “All the studies and research carried out so far have proven that there is no reason to believe that the Holocaust ever occurred and that it is only a tale.”
Others at the conference admitted the killings took place, but claimed the numbers were inflated:
Frederick Toben, an Australian who in 1999 served jail time in Germany for his Holocaust views, told the conference in no uncertain terms that the number of Jews killed in Nazi death camps — an estimated 6 million — is a myth.
”The number of victims at the Auschwitz concentration camp could be about 2,007,” Toben said. ”The railroad to the camp did not have enough capacity to transfer large numbers of Jews.”
Don’t mistake these for sincere historical quibbles. They are direct misstatements of the evidentiary record — a record whose existence, again, we owe in large part to the Nazis themselves.
“Extermination, we’re doing it”
Both propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels and SS chief Heinrich Himmler, for example, admitted there was an official plan to exterminate the Jewish population. “The Jews have deserved the catastrophe that has now overtaken them,” Goebbels wrote in his diary in 1942. “Not much will remain of the Jews. On the whole it can be said that about 60 percent of them will have to be liquidated whereas only 40 percent can be used for forced labor.”
Chillingly, Himmler said this in a 1943 speech in Posen, Poland:
I refer now to the evacuation of the Jews, the extermination of the Jewish people. This is one of those things that is easily said: “the Jewish people are being exterminated,” says every Party member, “quite true, it’s part of our plans, the elimination of the Jews, extermination, we’re doing it.”
No one left behind a ledger sheet tallying the precise number of Jews “exterminated” but that doesn’t mean the figure can’t be accurately estimated based on existing evidence such as census reports and other government records that survived Nazi efforts to destroy them at the end of the war:
No personnel were available or inclined to count Jewish deaths until the very end of World War II and the Nazi regime. Hence, total estimates are calculated only after the end of the war and are based on demographic loss data and the documents of the perpetrators. Though fragmentary, these sources provide essential figures from which to make calculations.
Rooted in anti-Semitism
Some Holocaust deniers are self-styled “historical revisionists” — meaning they present themselves as earnest re-interpreters of real historical data whose goal is simply to reveal the whole truth — but it’s a misnomer. Scratch the surface of your typical Holocaust denier and you will find an anti-Semite. The notion, widespread among deniers, that Jews “invented” or “exaggerated” the Holocaust to further their own interests hearkens back to a centuries-old conspiracy theory positing a secret “cabal” of wealthy Jewish bankers seeking absolute world domination.
“The Holocaust is the device used as the pillar of Zionist imperialism, Zionist aggression, Zionist terror and Zionist murder,” former Ku Klux Klan Imperial Wizard David Duke has said (while dismissing the claim that the Nazis used gas chambers to kill Jews as a “myth”).
In 2013, England’s most infamous Holocaust denier, David Irving (quoted above saying more people died in Ted Kennedy’s car than at Auschwitz), was asked if it weren’t true that Jews “run the world”:
Irving, who strongly denies being anti-semitic, replies: “Well sometimes people stand up and fight back.”
He says Jews in America control all media, banks and that “they dare not appoint any leading person in the White House to ministerial positions involving money without him being a Jew. Look where that got them in Germany in 1933. And they will not learn the lesson, they all think it won’t happen again.
“Then they ask why they are so hated.”
…
Irving says he hears people say Jews are hated because they crucified Jesus Christ. “I say if you walk into a pub in Wapping and ask people why they don’t like the Jews they don’t mention Jesus. They mention other reasons. They’re worried about their mortgages and the banks … that’s the reason why the Jews get hated.”
It’s telling that Irving denies hating Jews while repeatedly observing that “Jews are hated,” then blames them for it.
The rise of “soft denialism”
There is a relatively new form of Holocaust denialism — dubbed “soft denialism” because its adherents don’t deny the Holocaust outright but attempt to trivialize it instead — whose rise seems to have followed the same curve as that of right-wing nationalist movements worldwide in recent years.
The most prevalent form of soft denialism revolves around the claim that the persecution of Jews in Nazi Germany is given preferential treatment over the persecution of other minority groups by the same regime. But this is a moral deflection. It’s a fact that the Reich persecuted and killed millions of others in the name of “Aryan superiority” — Roma (“gypsies”), Serbs, Poles, individuals with disabilities, individuals perceived as “homosexual,” socialists, communists, and Jehovah’s Witnesses, to name only some of the targeted minorities — but this is no justification for eliding Hitler’s decades-long vendettaagainst the Jewish people in particular, a vendetta which very nearly ended in their complete eradication.
This essay will attempt to provide a brief historical review of Holocaust denial. For an in-depth treatment of this question, the reader is referred to two major works on the subject: Lucy S. Dawidowicz,Historians and the Holocaust and Deborah Lipstadt, Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory. The material in the present essay draws heavily from these two excellent works. Here I am concerned with the historical background and origins of the movement. Primary attention will be given to Paul Rassinier, Harry Elmer Barnes and Austin J. App.
The very first Holocaust deniers were the Nazis themselves. As it became increasingly obvious that the war was not going well, Himmler instructed his camp commandants to destroy records, crematoria and other sign of mass destruction of human beings. He was especially adamant with regard to those Jews still alive who could testify regarding their experiences in the camps. In April, 1945, he signed an official order (which still exists in his own handwriting) that the camps would not be surrendered and that no prisoner "fall into the hands of the enemies alive." Apparently Himmler knew that the "Final Solution" would be viewed as a moral outrage by the rest of the world.
Historian Kenneth Stern (1993:6) suggests that many top SS leaders left Germany at the end of the war and began immediately the process of using their propaganda skills to rewrite history. Shortly after the war, denial materials began to appear. One of the first was Friedrich Meinecke's The German Catastrophe, (1950) in which he offered a brief defense for the German people by blaming industrialists, bureaucrats and the Pan-German League (an essentially antisemitic organization begun by von Schoerner in Vienna prior to young Adolf Hitler's arrival there) for the outbreak of World War I and Hitler's rise to power. Meinecke was openly antisemitic; nonetheless he was a respected historian.
There is a fairly clear historical development of contemporary Holocaust denial. Surprisingly, its roots extend far beyond the Holocaust itself and may be found in the work of historical revisionists in Europe, principally France, and in the United States who set out to absolve Germany of responsibility for World War I.
Paul Rassinier, formerly a "political" prisoner at Buchenwald, was one of the first European writers to come to the defense of the Nazi regime with regard to their "extermination" policy. In 1945, Rassinier was elected as a Socialist member of the French National Assembly, a position which he held for less than two years before resigning for health reasons. Shortly after the war he began reading reports of extermination in Nazi death camps by means of gas chambersand crematoria. His response was, essentially, "I was there and there were no gas chambers." It should be remembered that he was confined to Buchenwald, the first major concentration camp created by the Hitler regime (1937) and that it was located in Germany. Buchenwald was not primarily a "death camp" and there were no gas chambers there. He was arrested and incarcerated in 1943. By that time the focus of the "Final Solution" had long since shifted to the Generalgouvernement of Poland. Rassinier used his own experience as a basis for denying the existence of gas chambers and mass extermination at other camps. Given his experience and his antisemitism, he embarked upon a writing career which, over the next 30 years, would place him at the center of Holocaust denial. In 1948 he published Le Passage de la Ligne, Crossing the Line, and, in 1950, The Holocaust Story and the Lie of Ulysses. In these early works he attempted to make two main arguments: first, while some atrocities were committed by the Germans, they have been greatly exaggerated and, second, that the Germans were not the perpetrators of these atrocities -- the inmates who ran the camps instigated them. In 1964 he published The Drama of European Jewry, a work committed to debunking what he called "the genocide myth." The major focus of this book was the denial of the gas chambers in the concentration camps, the denial of the widely accepted figure of 6 million Jews exterminated and the discounting of the testimony of the perpetrators following the war. These three have emerged in recent years as central tenets of Holocaust denial. While none of these arguments were new, Rassinier did introduce a new twist to Holocaust denial. Having argued that the genocidal extermination of 6 million Jews is a myth, he asks: Who perpetrated the myth, and for what purpose. His answer: the Zionists as part of a massive Jewish/Soviet/Allied conspiricay to "swindle" Germany out of billions of dollars in reparations. This is a theme which would later be taken up by Austin J. App and by the current crop of Holocaust deniers.
In 1977, the above works by Rassinier were re-published by the Noontide Press under the title, Debunking the Genocide Myth. The Noontide Press is the primary outlet for the Institute of Historical Review. Toward the end of his life he wrote two additional pieces, one on the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem (held in 1961) and one on the Auschwitz trial in Frankfurt. Both of these were translated by American historian, and admirer of Rassinier, Harry Elmer Barnes. These materials have been published by Steppingstones Publishing and are regularly advertised for sale by the Institute For Historical Review. Thus, the work of Rassinier takes its place in contemporary denial literature.
The claims of Rassinier can be easily refuted and have received full treatment by Deborah Lipstadt and other reputable historians. Briefly, however, Rassinier offers little evidence for most of his claims, he totally disregards any documentary evidence that would contradict his claims and attempts to explain away the testimony of survivors as"emotional" exaggeration and the testimony of accused war criminals as the result of "coercion." For instance, he completely ignores Hitler's stated agenda in Mein Kampf (1923) and his famous and oft-quoted speech of 1939 before the German Reichstag:
Today I want to be a prophet once more: If international finance Jewry inside and outside of Europe should succeed once more in plunging nations into another world war, the consequence will not be the Bolshevization of the earth and thereby the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe.
Similarly, he disregards the speeches of Himmler, such as the address given to the leaders of the SS in 1943:
I also want to talk with you, quite frankly, on a very grave matter. Among yourselves it should be mentioned quite frankly, and yet we will never speak of it publicly....I mean the clearing out of the Jews, the extermination of the Jewish race. (Quoted in Jackson Speilvogel, Hitler and Nazi Germany, 3rd ed., 1996:282).
Similarly, he disregards the Wansee Protocol which stands as clear evidence of an official Nazi policy of extermination.
As Lipstadt observes, the primary link between these early revisionists and modern deniers was the U.S. historian, Harry Elmer Barnes,the first American historian to take up the theme of Holocaust denial. During World War I he was an outspoken, even vitriolic, supporter of the Allied effort. After the war, however, he became highly pro-German and seemed intent on defending the German people against any responsibility for the war. While he blamed France and Russia for starting the war, he stopped short, in his early work, of blaming the Jews, as Kaiser Wilhelm had done. Barnes early work was fairly respectable historical analysis despite the fact that his agenda was a clear denunciation of U.S. foreign policy during World War I. These themes appear strongly in his, The Genesis of the Great War, 1926, In Quest of Truth and Justice, 1928 and World Politics in Modern Civilization, 1930. His two-volume The History of Western Civilization was widely adopted at prestigious schools throughout the United States. It was not until the late 1950s that his analysis extended to the issue of atrocities against Jews. This shift in his agenda coincides with his discovery of French popular historian, Paul Rassinier, and the American revisionist, David Leslie Hoggan.
Hoggan's dissertation at Harvard was a revisionist work in which he blamed Britain for World War II and presented Hitler as a victim of Allied manipulation. Throughout the work, Hitler is presented as conciliatory, reasonable and sincere in his attempts to avoid war. Barnes encouraged Hoggan to have the work published. After extensive re-writing, it was published, in Germany in 1961, under the title, The Forced War. The title reveals the thrust of the book -- World War II was forced upon Hitler. An important concern of the book was to downplay Nazi atrocities against Jews.
As historian, Deborah Lipstadt, observes:
Hoggan's book, on which Barnes heaped accolades, is full of such misrepresentations in relation to British and Polish foreign policy and concerning Germany's treatment of the Jews. His dissertation contains few such observations. Barnes read the dissertation before it was turned into a book and was in contact with Hoggan for a full six years before the book was published. Barnes helped get it published and provided a blurb for its jacket, obviously playing a significant role in turning this "solid conscientious piece of work" into a Nazi apoligia. (Denying the Holocaust,1993:73)
It was Barnes' discovery of Rassinier that seems to have been the pivotal point in his thinking. He began by arguing that the atrocity stories were exaggerated and slowly worked his way to the conclusion that they were fabrications. Stopping short of denying the Holocaust, Barnes attempted to connect the "exaggerated" atrocities with German reparations to Israel. Following the earlier lead of Rassinier, Barnes attempted to leave the impression that the size of the reparations were determined by the number of Jews killed in the Holocaust when actually the size of the reparations wad determined by the estimated cost of resettling Jews from Germany and occupied territories to Israel.
Finally, Barnes attempted to raise doubts about the Holocaust in general by raising doubts regarding the existence of gas chambers as a means of extermination....The existence and implementation of gas chambers for extermination purposes is a matter of special concern to deniers since they symbolize more dramatically than anything else the rational, systematic and impersonal nature of the killing machine. Every Holocaust denier feels compelled to make this issue central the argument. Barnes' contention was that the gas chambers were post-war inventions Surely Barnes was aware of the extensive testimony provided to the British as early as 1944 by Auschwitz escapee, Rudolph Vrba (see Martin Gilbert, Auschwitz And The Allies, 1981:190-198).
App's major contribution to Holocaust denial lies in his codification of denial into eight fundamental tenets (The following are adapted from Deborah Lipstadt, 1994:99-100):
1. Emigration, not extermination was the Nazi plan for dealing with Germany's "Jewish problem." His main evidence for this assertion is that if Germany had planned total extermination, no Jews would have survived.
2. No Jews were gassed in any German camps and probably not at Auschwitz either. He argued that the crematoria were designed to cremate those who died from other causes -- natural illness, etc.
3. Jews who disappeared during the years of WWII and have not been accounted for did so in territories under Soviet, rather than German, control.
4. The majority of Jews who were killed by the Nazis were people whom the Nazis had every right to "execute" as subversives, spies, and criminals.
5. If the Holocaust claims have any truth, Israel would have opened its archives to historians. Instead, he claims, they have preferred to continue perpetuating the Holocaust "hoax" by utilizing the charge of "antisemitism" against anyone who questions it.
6. All evidence to support the Holocaust "hoax" of 6 million dead rests upon misquotes of Nazis and Nazi documents.
7. Burden of proof argument. It is incumbent upon the accusers to prove the 6 million figure. Instead, App argues, Germany has been forced to prove that the 6 million is incorrect. This argument rests upon App's (and others') assertion that reparations paid to Israel by Germany are based on the 6 million figure. He consistently refers to the reparations as a Zionist "swindle."
8. Jewish historians and other scholars have great discrepancies in their calculations of the number of victims. App takes this as evidence that the claims are unverified.
The above assertions stand as the fundamental tenets of contemporary Holocaust denial.
Holocaust denial is rooted in the isolationism and historical revision of the WWI, post-War, WWII and Cold War periods. By the mid to late 1960s, all the ingredients of contemporary Holocaust denial were in place. Some of this background does, in fact, represent legitimate historical revision. Other parts of it, however, depart from the academic standards of historical analysis and move clearly in the direction of politically and ideologically motivated historical denial. One overarching characteristic of all deniers, the one characteristic which binds them all together, is antisemitism. Regardless of the language used to clothe their attacks upon memory and truth, it is the language of hate and fear. Regardless of pretensions of scholarship and even underlying traces of real scholarship, deniers ultimately come to rely upon the least respectable of all strategies -- stereotyping. The works of Rassinier, Barnes, Hoggan and App consistently fall back upon stereotypic images of the Jewish people which have been perpetuated for centuries and which show little sign of diminishing with the current crop of deniers.
"Every age has its own fascism."
- Primo Levi, survivor of Auschwitz
The film" Denial" on Saturday about David Irvings libeal case agaibst Professor Lipstadt concerning the holacaust. It depresses ne when i still come across anti Semetic posts. I have seen on local Facebook pages absolute ignorance and have seen a more disturbed trend where old conspiracy theories about " World Finance" and the Rothschild are reheated conspiracies that go back to the " Protocols of the Elders of Zion" There are many eho fail to understand of course between being anti Zionist and anti Semetic and President Trumps actions over Jerusalem will confuse others even more...
Only a year ago I was forced to debate with a young man on the premise he made that Hitler was a Socialist. While the young man in question is not anti semetic..his premise fed into this rehabilitation of Hitler dicourse that feeds more subtely into this alt right agenda....for those interewsted here ius the link for the debate.....https://rodolfowalshglasses.blogspot.co.uk/2016/10/the-resistible-rise-of-arturo-mackenzie.html
Just recently i saw a post from someone who had a Polish surname going on about the Rothschuild conspiracy. He had no idea that he had fallen for a far right agenda and seemed ignorant of the fate of the vast Jewish population of Eastern Europe. Those who know no history are deemed to repeat it. So I am forced to provide a long detailed piece on the stupidity and malice of the deniers. If they can take down the holacaust and say there is room to challenge its existence they build an agenda that is a nightmare.
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 semtic and racist. There is no doubt that the Holacaust happened and yet many demiers of its reality seek to question its very existence.and be apologists for Hitler and the Nazis.
One must always ask what does anyone gain from a particular position? Irvings position was by debting the reality of auswitz. If he couls show that Austwitz was false he could question the whole of the nazi Killing nachine. Auswitz was originally built as a prison camp and then later was cobverted to a concentration camp filled with gas chambers. Yo the far right auswitx seemed a meabs to deby the sydtematic mudder of six million jews. To the far right this is a propganda oppurtinity
Auschwitz-Birkenau 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-Birkenau 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-Birkenau. 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
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 Irvings books are selling dramatically in America and recently we have seeb the rise of new denials of the Holacaust. Recently social media is awash with claims suggesting that bot iomly was Hitler was unawere of the
The Holocaust happened. .the cowerd only threatened when he feels secure
It is a fact that some six million European Jews were systematically murdered by Nazi Germany and its collaborators between 1941 and 1945 in a state-sponsored program of genocide.
The National Socialists came to power in part by convincing Germans that many of the country’s problems were caused by its Jewish minority, whom they labeled an “inferior race” and depicted as depraved and animal-like in anti-Semitic propaganda. They named their plan for exterminating the Jews the “Final Solution.” Their implementation of a plan to exterminate the Jews — the “Final Solution,” they called it — has been well documented, starting with the 3,000 tons of confiscated of Third Reich paperwork presented in evidence at the Nuremberg trials immediately after the war.
Yet, despite universal agreement among historians about all of the above (“No serious historian questions that the Holocaust took place,” the American Historical Association affirmed in a 1991 statement), there exists a tiny but vocal group of naysayers — conspiracy theorists, actually, given that they claim that “Jewish-controlled” academic and media institutions “invented” the Holocaust — whose mission it is to sow doubt that the genocide of European Jews ever happened. They are known (to everyone but themselves) as Holocaust deniers.
Here are some basic tenets of Holocaust denialism (via the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum):
“Holocaust denial” describes attempts to negate the established facts of the Nazi genocide of European Jewry. Common denial assertions are: that the murder of six million Jews during World War II never occurred; that the Nazis had no official policy or intention to exterminate the Jews; and that the poison gas chambers in Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp never existed.
A newer trend is the distortion of the facts of the Holocaust. Common distortions include, for example, assertions that: the figure of six million Jewish deaths is an exaggeration; deaths in the concentration camps were the results of disease or starvation but not policy; and that the diary of Anne Frank is a forgery.
The deniers aren’t known for their subtlety. “I don’t see any reason to be tasteful about Auschwitz,” saidauthor, anti-Semite, and Holocaust denier David Irving in 1991. He continued:
It’s baloney, it’s a legend. Once we admit the fact that it was a brutal slave labor camp and large numbers of people did die, as large numbers of innocent people died elsewhere in the War, why believe the rest of the baloney?
I say quite tastelessly, in fact, that more women died on the back seat of Edward Kennedy’s car at Chappaquiddick than ever died in a gas chamber in Auschwitz.
At a 2006 conference of Holocaust deniers in Iran hosted by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the country’s former interior minister said, without irony, “All the studies and research carried out so far have proven that there is no reason to believe that the Holocaust ever occurred and that it is only a tale.”
Others at the conference admitted the killings took place, but claimed the numbers were inflated:
Frederick Toben, an Australian who in 1999 served jail time in Germany for his Holocaust views, told the conference in no uncertain terms that the number of Jews killed in Nazi death camps — an estimated 6 million — is a myth.
”The number of victims at the Auschwitz concentration camp could be about 2,007,” Toben said. ”The railroad to the camp did not have enough capacity to transfer large numbers of Jews.”
Don’t mistake these for sincere historical quibbles. They are direct misstatements of the evidentiary record — a record whose existence, again, we owe in large part to the Nazis themselves.
“Extermination, we’re doing it”
Both propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels and SS chief Heinrich Himmler, for example, admitted there was an official plan to exterminate the Jewish population. “The Jews have deserved the catastrophe that has now overtaken them,” Goebbels wrote in his diary in 1942. “Not much will remain of the Jews. On the whole it can be said that about 60 percent of them will have to be liquidated whereas only 40 percent can be used for forced labor.”
Chillingly, Himmler said this in a 1943 speech in Posen, Poland:
I refer now to the evacuation of the Jews, the extermination of the Jewish people. This is one of those things that is easily said: “the Jewish people are being exterminated,” says every Party member, “quite true, it’s part of our plans, the elimination of the Jews, extermination, we’re doing it.”
No one left behind a ledger sheet tallying the precise number of Jews “exterminated” but that doesn’t mean the figure can’t be accurately estimated based on existing evidence such as census reports and other government records that survived Nazi efforts to destroy them at the end of the war:
No personnel were available or inclined to count Jewish deaths until the very end of World War II and the Nazi regime. Hence, total estimates are calculated only after the end of the war and are based on demographic loss data and the documents of the perpetrators. Though fragmentary, these sources provide essential figures from which to make calculations.
Rooted in anti-Semitism
Some Holocaust deniers are self-styled “historical revisionists” — meaning they present themselves as earnest re-interpreters of real historical data whose goal is simply to reveal the whole truth — but it’s a misnomer. Scratch the surface of your typical Holocaust denier and you will find an anti-Semite. The notion, widespread among deniers, that Jews “invented” or “exaggerated” the Holocaust to further their own interests hearkens back to a centuries-old conspiracy theory positing a secret “cabal” of wealthy Jewish bankers seeking absolute world domination.
“The Holocaust is the device used as the pillar of Zionist imperialism, Zionist aggression, Zionist terror and Zionist murder,” former Ku Klux Klan Imperial Wizard David Duke has said (while dismissing the claim that the Nazis used gas chambers to kill Jews as a “myth”).
In 2013, England’s most infamous Holocaust denier, David Irving (quoted above saying more people died in Ted Kennedy’s car than at Auschwitz), was asked if it weren’t true that Jews “run the world”:
Irving, who strongly denies being anti-semitic, replies: “Well sometimes people stand up and fight back.”
He says Jews in America control all media, banks and that “they dare not appoint any leading person in the White House to ministerial positions involving money without him being a Jew. Look where that got them in Germany in 1933. And they will not learn the lesson, they all think it won’t happen again.
“Then they ask why they are so hated.”
…
Irving says he hears people say Jews are hated because they crucified Jesus Christ. “I say if you walk into a pub in Wapping and ask people why they don’t like the Jews they don’t mention Jesus. They mention other reasons. They’re worried about their mortgages and the banks … that’s the reason why the Jews get hated.”
It’s telling that Irving denies hating Jews while repeatedly observing that “Jews are hated,” then blames them for it.
The rise of “soft denialism”
There is a relatively new form of Holocaust denialism — dubbed “soft denialism” because its adherents don’t deny the Holocaust outright but attempt to trivialize it instead — whose rise seems to have followed the same curve as that of right-wing nationalist movements worldwide in recent years.
The most prevalent form of soft denialism revolves around the claim that the persecution of Jews in Nazi Germany is given preferential treatment over the persecution of other minority groups by the same regime. But this is a moral deflection. It’s a fact that the Reich persecuted and killed millions of others in the name of “Aryan superiority” — Roma (“gypsies”), Serbs, Poles, individuals with disabilities, individuals perceived as “homosexual,” socialists, communists, and Jehovah’s Witnesses, to name only some of the targeted minorities — but this is no justification for eliding Hitler’s decades-long vendettaagainst the Jewish people in particular, a vendetta which very nearly ended in their complete eradication.
This essay will attempt to provide a brief historical review of Holocaust denial. For an in-depth treatment of this question, the reader is referred to two major works on the subject: Lucy S. Dawidowicz,Historians and the Holocaust and Deborah Lipstadt, Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory. The material in the present essay draws heavily from these two excellent works. Here I am concerned with the historical background and origins of the movement. Primary attention will be given to Paul Rassinier, Harry Elmer Barnes and Austin J. App.
The very first Holocaust deniers were the Nazis themselves. As it became increasingly obvious that the war was not going well, Himmler instructed his camp commandants to destroy records, crematoria and other sign of mass destruction of human beings. He was especially adamant with regard to those Jews still alive who could testify regarding their experiences in the camps. In April, 1945, he signed an official order (which still exists in his own handwriting) that the camps would not be surrendered and that no prisoner "fall into the hands of the enemies alive." Apparently Himmler knew that the "Final Solution" would be viewed as a moral outrage by the rest of the world.
Historian Kenneth Stern (1993:6) suggests that many top SS leaders left Germany at the end of the war and began immediately the process of using their propaganda skills to rewrite history. Shortly after the war, denial materials began to appear. One of the first was Friedrich Meinecke's The German Catastrophe, (1950) in which he offered a brief defense for the German people by blaming industrialists, bureaucrats and the Pan-German League (an essentially antisemitic organization begun by von Schoerner in Vienna prior to young Adolf Hitler's arrival there) for the outbreak of World War I and Hitler's rise to power. Meinecke was openly antisemitic; nonetheless he was a respected historian.
There is a fairly clear historical development of contemporary Holocaust denial. Surprisingly, its roots extend far beyond the Holocaust itself and may be found in the work of historical revisionists in Europe, principally France, and in the United States who set out to absolve Germany of responsibility for World War I.
Paul Rassinier, formerly a "political" prisoner at Buchenwald, was one of the first European writers to come to the defense of the Nazi regime with regard to their "extermination" policy. In 1945, Rassinier was elected as a Socialist member of the French National Assembly, a position which he held for less than two years before resigning for health reasons. Shortly after the war he began reading reports of extermination in Nazi death camps by means of gas chambersand crematoria. His response was, essentially, "I was there and there were no gas chambers." It should be remembered that he was confined to Buchenwald, the first major concentration camp created by the Hitler regime (1937) and that it was located in Germany. Buchenwald was not primarily a "death camp" and there were no gas chambers there. He was arrested and incarcerated in 1943. By that time the focus of the "Final Solution" had long since shifted to the Generalgouvernement of Poland. Rassinier used his own experience as a basis for denying the existence of gas chambers and mass extermination at other camps. Given his experience and his antisemitism, he embarked upon a writing career which, over the next 30 years, would place him at the center of Holocaust denial. In 1948 he published Le Passage de la Ligne, Crossing the Line, and, in 1950, The Holocaust Story and the Lie of Ulysses. In these early works he attempted to make two main arguments: first, while some atrocities were committed by the Germans, they have been greatly exaggerated and, second, that the Germans were not the perpetrators of these atrocities -- the inmates who ran the camps instigated them. In 1964 he published The Drama of European Jewry, a work committed to debunking what he called "the genocide myth." The major focus of this book was the denial of the gas chambers in the concentration camps, the denial of the widely accepted figure of 6 million Jews exterminated and the discounting of the testimony of the perpetrators following the war. These three have emerged in recent years as central tenets of Holocaust denial. While none of these arguments were new, Rassinier did introduce a new twist to Holocaust denial. Having argued that the genocidal extermination of 6 million Jews is a myth, he asks: Who perpetrated the myth, and for what purpose. His answer: the Zionists as part of a massive Jewish/Soviet/Allied conspiricay to "swindle" Germany out of billions of dollars in reparations. This is a theme which would later be taken up by Austin J. App and by the current crop of Holocaust deniers.
In 1977, the above works by Rassinier were re-published by the Noontide Press under the title, Debunking the Genocide Myth. The Noontide Press is the primary outlet for the Institute of Historical Review. Toward the end of his life he wrote two additional pieces, one on the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem (held in 1961) and one on the Auschwitz trial in Frankfurt. Both of these were translated by American historian, and admirer of Rassinier, Harry Elmer Barnes. These materials have been published by Steppingstones Publishing and are regularly advertised for sale by the Institute For Historical Review. Thus, the work of Rassinier takes its place in contemporary denial literature.
The claims of Rassinier can be easily refuted and have received full treatment by Deborah Lipstadt and other reputable historians. Briefly, however, Rassinier offers little evidence for most of his claims, he totally disregards any documentary evidence that would contradict his claims and attempts to explain away the testimony of survivors as"emotional" exaggeration and the testimony of accused war criminals as the result of "coercion." For instance, he completely ignores Hitler's stated agenda in Mein Kampf (1923) and his famous and oft-quoted speech of 1939 before the German Reichstag:
Today I want to be a prophet once more: If international finance Jewry inside and outside of Europe should succeed once more in plunging nations into another world war, the consequence will not be the Bolshevization of the earth and thereby the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe.
Similarly, he disregards the speeches of Himmler, such as the address given to the leaders of the SS in 1943:
I also want to talk with you, quite frankly, on a very grave matter. Among yourselves it should be mentioned quite frankly, and yet we will never speak of it publicly....I mean the clearing out of the Jews, the extermination of the Jewish race. (Quoted in Jackson Speilvogel, Hitler and Nazi Germany, 3rd ed., 1996:282).
Similarly, he disregards the Wansee Protocol which stands as clear evidence of an official Nazi policy of extermination.
As Lipstadt observes, the primary link between these early revisionists and modern deniers was the U.S. historian, Harry Elmer Barnes,the first American historian to take up the theme of Holocaust denial. During World War I he was an outspoken, even vitriolic, supporter of the Allied effort. After the war, however, he became highly pro-German and seemed intent on defending the German people against any responsibility for the war. While he blamed France and Russia for starting the war, he stopped short, in his early work, of blaming the Jews, as Kaiser Wilhelm had done. Barnes early work was fairly respectable historical analysis despite the fact that his agenda was a clear denunciation of U.S. foreign policy during World War I. These themes appear strongly in his, The Genesis of the Great War, 1926, In Quest of Truth and Justice, 1928 and World Politics in Modern Civilization, 1930. His two-volume The History of Western Civilization was widely adopted at prestigious schools throughout the United States. It was not until the late 1950s that his analysis extended to the issue of atrocities against Jews. This shift in his agenda coincides with his discovery of French popular historian, Paul Rassinier, and the American revisionist, David Leslie Hoggan.
Hoggan's dissertation at Harvard was a revisionist work in which he blamed Britain for World War II and presented Hitler as a victim of Allied manipulation. Throughout the work, Hitler is presented as conciliatory, reasonable and sincere in his attempts to avoid war. Barnes encouraged Hoggan to have the work published. After extensive re-writing, it was published, in Germany in 1961, under the title, The Forced War. The title reveals the thrust of the book -- World War II was forced upon Hitler. An important concern of the book was to downplay Nazi atrocities against Jews.
As historian, Deborah Lipstadt, observes:
Hoggan's book, on which Barnes heaped accolades, is full of such misrepresentations in relation to British and Polish foreign policy and concerning Germany's treatment of the Jews. His dissertation contains few such observations. Barnes read the dissertation before it was turned into a book and was in contact with Hoggan for a full six years before the book was published. Barnes helped get it published and provided a blurb for its jacket, obviously playing a significant role in turning this "solid conscientious piece of work" into a Nazi apoligia. (Denying the Holocaust,1993:73)
It was Barnes' discovery of Rassinier that seems to have been the pivotal point in his thinking. He began by arguing that the atrocity stories were exaggerated and slowly worked his way to the conclusion that they were fabrications. Stopping short of denying the Holocaust, Barnes attempted to connect the "exaggerated" atrocities with German reparations to Israel. Following the earlier lead of Rassinier, Barnes attempted to leave the impression that the size of the reparations were determined by the number of Jews killed in the Holocaust when actually the size of the reparations wad determined by the estimated cost of resettling Jews from Germany and occupied territories to Israel.
Finally, Barnes attempted to raise doubts about the Holocaust in general by raising doubts regarding the existence of gas chambers as a means of extermination....The existence and implementation of gas chambers for extermination purposes is a matter of special concern to deniers since they symbolize more dramatically than anything else the rational, systematic and impersonal nature of the killing machine. Every Holocaust denier feels compelled to make this issue central the argument. Barnes' contention was that the gas chambers were post-war inventions Surely Barnes was aware of the extensive testimony provided to the British as early as 1944 by Auschwitz escapee, Rudolph Vrba (see Martin Gilbert, Auschwitz And The Allies, 1981:190-198).
App's major contribution to Holocaust denial lies in his codification of denial into eight fundamental tenets (The following are adapted from Deborah Lipstadt, 1994:99-100):
1. Emigration, not extermination was the Nazi plan for dealing with Germany's "Jewish problem." His main evidence for this assertion is that if Germany had planned total extermination, no Jews would have survived.
2. No Jews were gassed in any German camps and probably not at Auschwitz either. He argued that the crematoria were designed to cremate those who died from other causes -- natural illness, etc.
3. Jews who disappeared during the years of WWII and have not been accounted for did so in territories under Soviet, rather than German, control.
4. The majority of Jews who were killed by the Nazis were people whom the Nazis had every right to "execute" as subversives, spies, and criminals.
5. If the Holocaust claims have any truth, Israel would have opened its archives to historians. Instead, he claims, they have preferred to continue perpetuating the Holocaust "hoax" by utilizing the charge of "antisemitism" against anyone who questions it.
6. All evidence to support the Holocaust "hoax" of 6 million dead rests upon misquotes of Nazis and Nazi documents.
7. Burden of proof argument. It is incumbent upon the accusers to prove the 6 million figure. Instead, App argues, Germany has been forced to prove that the 6 million is incorrect. This argument rests upon App's (and others') assertion that reparations paid to Israel by Germany are based on the 6 million figure. He consistently refers to the reparations as a Zionist "swindle."
8. Jewish historians and other scholars have great discrepancies in their calculations of the number of victims. App takes this as evidence that the claims are unverified.
The above assertions stand as the fundamental tenets of contemporary Holocaust denial.
Holocaust denial is rooted in the isolationism and historical revision of the WWI, post-War, WWII and Cold War periods. By the mid to late 1960s, all the ingredients of contemporary Holocaust denial were in place. Some of this background does, in fact, represent legitimate historical revision. Other parts of it, however, depart from the academic standards of historical analysis and move clearly in the direction of politically and ideologically motivated historical denial. One overarching characteristic of all deniers, the one characteristic which binds them all together, is antisemitism. Regardless of the language used to clothe their attacks upon memory and truth, it is the language of hate and fear. Regardless of pretensions of scholarship and even underlying traces of real scholarship, deniers ultimately come to rely upon the least respectable of all strategies -- stereotyping. The works of Rassinier, Barnes, Hoggan and App consistently fall back upon stereotypic images of the Jewish people which have been perpetuated for centuries and which show little sign of diminishing with the current crop of deniers.
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