Did the Holocaust really happen? - a serious discussion

[Chris OConnor]

There are thousands and thousands of photos and documents proving that the Jews were systematically exterminated. Germany embarrassingly admits it happened.

What about all of the 100's of Nazi's that admitted to participating in the annihilation of the Jews via gas chambers? What about all the first-hand accounts of Jews that survived the concentration camps? What about all the witness testimonies? These people were witnesses and not convicted of crimes. Why did they lie? Do you really think they all were part of a huge conspiracy?

Instead of copying and pasting material you didn't write please explain in your own words how and why this conspiracy occurred.

[PatrickSMcNally]

There are thousands and thousands of photos and documents proving that the Jews were systematically exterminated.

There are lots of documents showing that the Third Reich carried out a mass-expulsion of Jews from Europe and shipped them to the far ends of eastern Europe. There are no documents supporting the existence of gas chambers or of any planned extermnation.

The bit about photos offers a very good illustration of how Allied propaganda manipulated and falsified evidence. At the close of WWII lots of very gruesome films were made in the west, not in the east, of bodies either stacked up or bulldozed. Many people still are under the false impression that these are photos of death camps. However if you bother reading the standard orthodox histories of the alleged Holocaust by people generally hailed as leading authorities such as Raul Hilberg, then you'll realize very quickly that these are not evidence of death camps. What is fully acknowledged within the orthodox view is that the only death camps which really existed were, allegedly, in Poland. It is also clearly desribed that the camps in the west, which no one claims were ever extermination camps, experienced a massive outburst of disease and starvation in the last year of the war as huge numbers of prisoners from the east fled to the west from the Russians and Allied bombing destroyed the railways for keeping camps supplied. This accounted for the dead bodies which are so often flashed on photographs as proof of death camps.

What about all of the 100's of Nazi's that admitted to participating in the annihilation of the Jews via gas chambers?

If you take some time to review how the trials were conducted then you'll realize that the defendants in Allied-run trials had no choice but to accept the main outlines of allegations and then seek to argue against their personal responsibility. For example, Rudolf Hoess was tortured by the British until he signed a meaningless confession.

What about all the first-hand accounts of Jews that survived the concentration camps? What about all the witness testimonies?

Many of those testimonies were so baltantly false that they've been quietly dumped by the official Holocaust Industry, which still perpetuates the claim that serious trials were held. For example, it was charged in the Nuremberg trials that a steam chamber was used for mass-execution purposes at Treblinka. It was also claimed that Belzec had an electrocution chamber which fried prisoners to a crisp. Dachau was asserted to have run a gas chamber. These were show trials where prisoners seeking revenge against their former captors were encouraged by Allied and Soviet authorities to make up whatever story the liked as an accusation that wouldn't be scrutinized.

Why did they lie? Do you really think they all were part of a huge conspiracy?

As already noted, revenge against former captors was a good enough motive for most prisoners. In most cases it was totally unnecessary for such prisoners to see themselves as part of a "huge conspiracy." The only caveat which should be added to that is that those prisoners who belonged to Communist parties would have cooperated int he show trials not only for personal revenge but as part of the package of subordination to Moscow which such parties followed. For many former prisoners seeking revenge, however, such subordination to Moscow was totally unnecessary as an added motive.

please explain in your own words how and why this conspiracy occurred.

Well the first most obvious problem with your phraseology there is that it poses a demand for a single all-unifying conspiracy stretched across decades. In the real world events of this complexity involve many competing interests. But some braod patterns can be laid out.

First, one must realize that it was the aim of all the Allied powers after WWII to accomplish what the Versailles Treaty had failed to achieve: the permanent obstruction of any further rise of German power. France, Britain, the USA and the USSR all shared in this goal for their own ends. After WWI France had insisted upon a war-guilt clause being incorporated into the Versailled Treaty blaming Germany with full responsibility for the outbreak of war in 1914. It failed that time, but after the second war the Allied powers were much more determined to enforce disciplinary steps against Germany.

One should keep in mind as well the way that post-WWI revisionist writings had exposed many lies from the earlier war in the 1930s and that this had created a degree of skepticism in the 1930s. This level of pre-war skepticism towards propaganda allows us to account for the willingness of each of the Allied powers and the USSR to incorporate claims about Jews being exterminated within the post-WWII trials. In WWI the British had churned out stories of Belgian women having their breasts cut off by German soldiers. In 1945 it was necessary that current propaganda should have at least a more superficial resemblance to the truth. Since it is was a fact that Germany had sought a Europe without Jews that was to be attained by expelling Jews to the outer edges of Asia, this provided the basis for accepting the story of an extermination-plan as a good choice of propaganda.

Even so, for the first decade or so after WWII the charges of a Nazi plan to exterminate Jews were merely one among many claims circulating within a realm of literature which portrayed the whole body of WWII as a necessary fight for liberty. Although he accepts the orthodox version of the alleged Holocaust rather too uncritically, Peter Novick's book THE HOLOCAUST IN AMERICAN LIFE does a good job of outlining how the view of events began shifting radically, first with the Eichmann show trial and then with the Six-Day War.

That itself led to the development of a new chain of interests bound up with promoting the myth of the Holcaust, many of which are closely connected with the Israel lobby. What should be realized is that this later version of a developing Holocaust Industry would not have been able to advance as it did had the Allied powers not already committed themselves at Nuremberg to a certain version fo the story. Since the basis for Allied victory could only be justified by maintaining the charges of Nuremberg, there was no way of withdrawing from such claims when newer interest groups began exploiting the old charges to their advantage.

A partial exception to this rule was the post-war Soviet propaganda which often was accused of downplaying the alleged genocide against Jews and instead accented itself towards the Aryan-Slav conflict when describing the Third Reich. Within the west what occurred instead was that the charges of a Nazi plan to exterminate Jews were gradually promoted to preeminence, particularly outside of academic circles. The one very partial exception within western academia which developed was put forward by Chris Browning and is sometimes called "the functionalist interpretation of the Holocaust." Browning's view can be sensibly adapted to the reality of the Nazi expulsion of Jews from Europe. But on the more technical aspects of the case that would relate to charges of extermination, Browning showed himself to be a dunce in the 1988 trial of Ernst Zundel.

[Chris OConnor]

The fascinating thing to me is you. I'm more interested in you then in debating whether or not the Holocaust actually happened. Of course it happened. Everyone knows it happened. There is a mountain of evidence. Germany admits it happened, apologizes for it and is struggling to deal with the embarrassment of this legacy.

But something in you wants to deny it and this is what makes me scratch my head in bewilderment. I have a feeling you won't open up and reveal your true motives. Perhaps you haven't analyzed yourself deeply enough to understand why you're on this quest to wipe out the evidence and record of the most evil event in human history.

Who are you? Are you an American? Are you German? Jewish? There is more to your denial than what is presented in this post. And I've been in this situation numerous times before so I'll quickly tell you that the answer, "Who I am as a person is irrelevant" is simply your opinion and not a quality response. In my opinion you don't believe in the Holocaust because of something deeper. Something in your history or psychology. The facts are blatantly obvious about the Holocaust. It is time you looked in the mirror, stepped back, and analyzed yourself. This of course is my opinion, once again.

Your denial of the Holocaust is no more rational than the people that deny we landed on the moon, that the US government is directly responsible for 9/11, that the US government has a cure for AID's but is holding it back because there is no money in the cure (or for other reasons such as population control), etc... I'm sure you believe in some of the above or maybe in UFO's, astral projection, astrology, ESP, reincarnation, telepathy, and other such extraordinary claims. Am I hitting the nail on the head?

So to me this is more about you and what makes people like you deny the obvious in favor of the absurd. Something is going on at a deeper level and it, quite frankly, scares the shit out of me. The fact that you're able to deny the Holocaust means you can voluntarily believe anything you set your mind and heart to believing. Facts can be twisted and ignored and swept under the carpet. Little discrepancies can be exploded into concrete evidence that the entire event is clearly fictitious. This frightens me the same is it frightens me when grown adults believe in gods, demons, ghosts and witches without evidence.

And please don't take too much offense to my words. I'm bright enough to know that most people think you're wrong and anytime you have shared your feelings with other people they have found you to be a little off. So let's get past the arguing part and really discuss the underlying motives. And if you'd like to start with the premise that your personal history and experiences are irrelevant fine. Let's start with that premise stated up front. But now, please, do us the justice of sharing your personal history and experiences. Let us decide whether or not they are irrelevant.

Here is a February 10, 2008 article where German students discuss the Holocaust. Germany was the enemy so it makes little sense that the actual enemy would have been so gullible as to fall for the Allied propoganda. Why does Germany admit to the Holocaust?

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/10/nyreg ... colwe.html

An article about how even Germany is considering making denying the Holocaust a criminal offense. Why would they do this? And of course Americans will find any violation of free speech to be wrong, but think about the real issue here. Germany is so embarrassed by the Holocaust deniers that they wish to shut them up. They don't want the rest of the world to believe that Germany endorses such irrational claims.

http://www.dw-world.de/dw/article/0,214 ... 16,00.html

[Frank 013]

I would like to add something here; before I was sent to Iraq for Desert Storm I had a layover for one month in Germany. I was at a post called Pender Barracks in the southern part of the country.

The barracks was converted first from a castle for use by the Nazis and later converted for use by American forces.

Pender barracks had access to Hitler's underground rail system and it included holding cells for the concentration cap prisoners. The cells were little more than 3x3 stackable wire cages marked with a name tag and Jewish star.

Why would these cages be there if not for the transportation of Jewish nationals? And if the Nazis were inhumane enough to treat the Jews like animals during transport, I have little trouble seeing them taking the next step towards genocide.

In short, the evidence is still there. If it was a conspiracy why would evidence still be found in obscure places all over the country?

Later

[Chris OConnor]

This is a great question and one I have asked myself too.

The same question can be asked of the god belief. Why would a deity create such an abundance of evidence supporting the Big Bang, a billions of years old universe and planet, a fossil record that clearly shows change over time, and all the other pieces of evidence supporting modern science, yet contradict it all in the Bible?

Something (a brain) tells me that God didn't do anything of the sort. God doesn't even exist and the people that made up the myths of the Bible created them long before we had answers to all these big questions. But I digress. Sorry about that guys. I just cannot help drawing the correlation.

[LanDroid]

Knowing efforts to disprove the Holocaust will never stop, a foundation set up by Steven Speilberg has filmed untold thousands of hours of testimony by survivors so a record of their experiences is maintained. Video testimony by nearly 52,000 survivors and observers has been saved. You can search and review some of them here:

http://college.usc.edu/vhi/otv/otv.php

[PatrickSMcNally]

Why would these cages be there if not for the transportation of Jewish nationals?

No one has ever disputed the mass-deportation under police-state condition of Jews from Europe by the Third Reich. The scene you're describing is fairly common in police-states. Iraq is a good example of how attempts were made to fabricate a story of up to 400,000 Kurds murdered with poison gas by Saddam Hussein. Since they began a search for bodies the last available report in 2004 said they had found 5000:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2004 ... iraq.iraq1

Even so, no one disputes that Iraq was a police-state and that something like scenes of cages can be likely found within the Ba'athist prison system. This offers a lesson in the need to distinguish among what supposed evidence really does and does not imply.

For the first 15 years after WWII it was claimed that extermination camps equipped with gas chambers had existed all across Germany. In the 1960s it was acknowledged that none had ever existed on German territory but that allegedly 6 such extermination camps had existed in Poland. such a sweeping change without explanation was just pushed casually across. Although the Nuremberg trials had produced nothing different as "evidence" for the alleged eastern extermination camps than they did for the west, it was now acknowledged that the "evidence" presented at these staged trials was worthless with regards to the western camps. But the legends for the Polish camps were maintained for as long as the Cold War went on.

[PatrickSMcNally]

Knowing efforts to disprove the Holocaust will never stop, a foundation set up by Steven Speilberg has filmed untold thousands of hours of testimony by survivors so a record of their experiences is maintained.

Unfortunately it was not a practice in the Nuremberg trials or any of the later for testimony to carefully scrutinized and this has resulted in ludicrous stories being passed around uncritically. There just another recent case where Misha Defonseca admitted that her story was fraudulent:

http://abcnews.go.com/print?id=4367305

But that's hardly the most significant case. In the 1985 trial of Ernst Zundel Rudolf Vrba and Arnold Friedman were called as witnesses for the prosecution. They had both been prominent as survivors with "testimony" to offer, but they were demolished when Douglas Christie began asking them methodical questions. Friedman admitted on the witness stand that he had never seen a gas chamber but had only repeated what other people had told him he should say. Vrba admitted that his book I CANNOT FORGIVE was based upon "poetic license" rather than fact.

Step away from all of the alleged "testimonies" churned out after the war and in subsequent years and consider some simple scientific facts. The water level around Auschwitz was 18 inches from the surface of the earth. It's a very swampy region around Auschwitz. Now supposedly giant pits were dug several years deep and thousands of bodies dumped in the pits to be burned. In such an environment these hypothetical thousands bodies would simply be immersed in water that would rise to the surface as the water below 18 inches of digging would be displaced by bodies dumped into a pit several yards deep. Consequently the bodies would not burn and hundreds of thousands of uncremated bodies should have been found rotting in the swamps about Auschwitz. This was never found. It's war propaganda, just like the myth of the Iraqi WMDs ready to go off on 45 minutes notice.

Forensic science has to always take precedence over testimony which conflicts with reality. Only when testimonies have passed such scrutiny can they then be used seriously as a reference point.

[PatrickSMcNally]

Why would a deity create such an abundance of evidence supporting the Big Bang

That's a false comparison since there is no such abundance of evidence supporting the myth of the gas chambers. What has been admitted by such figures as Raul Hilberg and Christopher Browning is that no extermination order exists, all of the documents discussing the "Final Solution" speak of "evacuation of the Jews" such as it is phrased in the Wannsee documents, no substantive documents of gas chambers exist other than "testimonies" given at the Nuremberg trial and its follow-ups. Daniel Goldhagen goes further in HITLER'S WILLING EXECUTIONERS and even starts to claim that gas chambers were peripheral to events. No one has yet produced any evidence in the form of either an authenticated functional execution gas chamber or even a clear layout of how such a gas chamber was alleged to have been installed and operated. All of this can be found out just by reading the official literature from such authors as Hilberg and Browning. Revisionists come into play when it becomes an issue of actually answering the questions which official historians are unable to. But the claims about an "abundance of evidence" supporting the official story are clearly false in themselves.

What all of the attempts to support the official story of the alleged Holocaust lean upon, aside from the more dishonest false tesimonies and fabricated documents which were both abundant at Nuremberg, are two key points:

1) There was a major counter-insurgency war going on across eastern Europe, and especially on the territory of the Soviet Union, and all such counter-insurgency campaigns tend to breed their own fair share of My Lai massacres. That, however, is qualitatively fundamentally different from the claims about an alleged extermination plan aimed at killing all Jews.

2) As it appears in the Wannsee document and other similar sources, the Third Reich formulated a plan for "evacuation of the Jews" whose intent was a wholesale deportation by force of Jews from Europe into Asia. That involves a violation of human rights in itself, but of a kind which is unfortunately very common in human history. There is nothing to support the claim that "evacuation" was a codeword for anything.

These two basic factual points were pumped up by Allied propaganda after the war so as to magnify a distinction between themselves and the defeated power and the result today is our modern fable of the Holocaust.

[Frank 013]

So Patrick, you are saying that nearly 52,000 people who claim to be survivors and observers are all lying in front of Steven Speilberg's camera?