Was there really a "Holocaust"? I would like to hear both sides of the issue.

---

Request for Question Clarification by knowledge_seeker-ga on 27 Oct 2003 15:40 PST

dspratlin, 

The two sides of the Holocaust debate are: 

1) That of the historical record
2) That of holocaust revisionists

Perhaps you could enlighten the researcher community as to which side
you feel was not represented in Umiat's answer.

-K~

Hello, dspratin-ga!


 You have asked a question which will ignite many fires. Since I have
a very definite belief about whether the Holocaust DID occur, I will
simply point you to articles containing opinions and arguments on both
sides of this issue. I have referenced the opinions in no particular
order.
 


=================
SETTING THE SCENE 
=================

What is the Holocaust?
-----------------------

"The Holocaust is the state-sponsored systematic persecution and
annihilation of European Jewry by Nazi Germany and its collaborators
between 1933 and 1945. Jews were the primary victims -- six million
were murdered; Roma and Sinti (Gypsies), people with mental and
physical disabilities, and Poles were also targeted for destruction or
decimation for racial, ethnic, or national reasons. Millions more,
including homosexuals, Jehovah's Witnesses, Soviet prisoners of war,
and political dissidents, also suffered grievous oppression and death
under Nazi Germany."



When did the United States government learn of the Nazis' systematic
attempts to kill all of European Jewry?
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

"Though intelligence data and news reports revealed Nazi violence
against Jews as early as 1933, and a dramatic increase in that
violence in 1941, scholars generally agree that the United States
government did not receive reliable confirmation of the full scope of
the Nazis' "Final Solution" until August, 1942."

"On August 1, 1942, Gerhart Riegner, a representative of the World
Jewish Congress in Switzerland, received information from a German
source regarding a Nazi plan to exterminate all the Jews in Europe.
Due to the shocking and somewhat unbelievable nature of the report,
Riegner refrained from passing on this information until he
investigated its source. One week later, satisfied with the
reliability of the informant - though unable to confirm the news
itself - Riegner requested that the American consulate in Geneva cable
this information to the American and other Allied governments, along
with Rabbi Stephen Wise, president of the World Jewish Congress in New
York. However, given the unsubstantiated nature of Riegner's report,
the State Department chose not to forward it to Rabbi Wise and instead
suppressed it."

"In the months that followed, as reports of massacres of Jews steadily
increased, a pile of evidence grew validating the idea that the Nazis
were carrying out a plan to destroy the Jews of Europe. Finally, on
November 24, 1942, Rabbi Wise held a press conference to announce news
of the Nazis' "extermination campaign." A few weeks later, on December
17, 1942, the United States, Britain, and ten other allied governments
made this news official, feeling confident enough in the evidence to
publicly reveal their knowledge of the Nazis' plan to systematically
kill all of Europe's Jews."

From the United State Holocaust Memorial Museum Website:
http://www.ushmm.org/research/library/index.utp?content=faq/right.htm



========
OPINIONS
========

"I want to talk about a question that, according to some people, has
no, or at least no definite answer. Was there really a holocaust? Ever
since I was in third or fourth grade, I have known about the
holocaust. I knew that the Nazis killed 6 million Jews, I knew what
they had done and I knew the stories. So I had an immense hatred for
the Nazis, so much so that at the young age of 9 or 10, when we where
studying western Europe, I was writing stuff in my notebook about the
Nazis that I canít repeat here, in polite company. But it wasn't until
recently that I have come to read books and think about this
question."

"When my parents asked me, do you think the holocaust even existed? My
answer was "Of course, duh!" But when I found out that people were
actually denying the truth, I became extremely interested in the issue
of holocaust denial."

......

"This brings me to the idea of Holocaust Denial. The deniers claim
that many camps cannot be found, and many of the millions of people
that supposedly died in the holocaust died in other ways. I personally
think that this is absurd. It is absurd because all the 11+ million
people could not have died from natural causes, that ís for sure. Mass
suicide may have amounted to some 200 thousand, not 11 million people.
And what about the thousands who survived the death camps when the
Nazi armies collapsed? How come all those thousands told pretty much
the same stories about what had happened to them and their relatives?
Where else could those millions have gone? Did they die in the Nazis
mines? If so, where are the bodies? Or did they leave for Palestine?
If so, why were there so few Jews in Palestine at the end of the war?

"The denial of the holocaust has been going on since the end of World
War 2 There were many different evolutions of holocaust denial. The
first stage lasted until the mid to late 60s. The second stage, or the
revisionist movement, continues into the present."

Read more..............

From "Answering The Questions That Don't Have Any Answers, Or Did The
Holocaust Really Happen?" by Natan Pill-Kahan.
http://www.sholem.org/docs/NatanPillKahan.htm


********


(The following site is quite comprehensive)

"Evidence of the existence of the Holocaust was well documented by the
German government itself. It was further well documented by the Allied
forces who entered Germany and its associated Axis states towards the
end of World War II. Among the evidence produced was film and stills
of the existence of concentration camps, as well as the testimony of
those freed when the camps were entered."

"The Holocaust was a massive undertaking that lasted for years across
several countries, with its own command and control infrastructure.
Although the Nazis made attempts to destroy the evidence of the
Holocaust when they could see that their defeat was imminent, they
left many tons of documents relating to the Holocaust. Due to the
extremely rapid collapse of the Nazi forces at the end of the war,
attempts to destroy evidence in Germany were for the most part
unsuccessful."

"After their defeat, many tons of documents were recovered, and many
thousands of bodies were found not yet completely decomposed, in mass
graves near many concentration camps. The physical evidence and the
documentary proof included records of train shipments of Jews to the
camps, orders for tons of cyanide and other poisons, and the remaining
concentration camp structures. Interviews with survivors completed the
picture."

"As a result of the records produced, historians agree that Holocaust
denial is contrary to the known facts of history."

From "Holocaust denial". Wikipedia.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocaust_denial

(also contains links to revisionist sites)


********


"There will always be among us those who listen to their own hatred,
those who are slaves to ignorance and intolerance, and those who
choose to ignore history and its implications. Such is the case with
the Holocaust - there are individuals and organizations determined to
downplay or simply ignore what happened in Nazi Germany and occupied
Europe preceding and during World War II."

Read more....

From "History denied is history repeated," by Donald Hunt. 
http://www.notso.com/again.htm



********


"The US Holocaust Memorial Museum displays no convincing proof
whatever of homicidal gas chambers, and no proof that even one
individual was "gassed" in a German program of "genocide."

"The question, then, is not "Did the Holocaust happen?" The question
is: If there were no gas chambers, what was the Holocaust?"

Read more...

From "A Revisionist Challenge to the US Holocaust Memorial Museum", by
Bradley Smith. (1997) http://www.codoh.com/ads/adschallenge.html



********


"I am studying WWII and have been beset by doubts.....

Follow this heated and opinionated discussion thread...........

From "World War II - Did the Holocaust Happen?"   
http://killdevilhill.com/wwiichat/read.php?f=83&i=30&t=30


********


"The unfortunate aspect of Holocaust revisionm is that it is mainly
the historians with antisemitic or neo-Nazi tendencies who have gained
most public attention; it is their attempts at revision which are best
known and gaining credence among younger people, many of whom are
quite ignorant of the history of the Second World War. This trend is
helped along by the refusal of respected historians and other
specialists to be seen to lending them any credibility by meeting with
them in public debate or by responding to their claims. While this is
understandable it does also foreclose in many people's minds the
possibility of ANY historical review of the Holocaust being valid or
having been conducted with professional rigour and honourable motives.

* The absence of reasonable voices in the public arena has left the
field open to vulgar extremists, with the result that an increasing
number of people are now believing that the Holocaust did not happen,
or that it did happen but was not as terrible as we have been led to
believe."

Read "Historical Revisionism and Holocaust Denial".
http://www.weird-bytes.com/Ex_Animo_archive/p5.html


********


"If the official holocaust version were true, very few Jews would have
survived in the German sphere of influence."

From Chapter 6. "The simplest argument against the extermination
thesis".  Holocaust Revisionism And its Political Consequences. Jürgen
Graf  (January 2001) http://www.ety.com/tell/books/jglife/06.htm

Chapters Online:
http://www.ety.com/tell/books/jglife/jgtoc.htm

 
********


Read "Pondering significance, awaiting verdict in Holocaust denial
trial" by Douglas Davis. Jewish Telegraphic Agency.(2003)
http://www.jewishsf.com/bk000324/ilipstadt.shtml

This cannot be reproduced)



********



Did The Holocaust Happen? by Jim Loy (1998)
http://www.jimloy.com/history/holocaus.htm

(This cannot be copied due to copyright) 


********


Read History of Holocaust Denial Arguments:

"What is Holocaust Denial?" Shoah Resource Center
http://www.yadvashem.org/odot/prog/index_before_change_table.asp?gate=5-35


********


No title:
http://216.239.53.104/search?q=cache:Gtk_Z1RQHSQJ:members.odinsrage.com/reo/holocaust.doc+arguments+against+the+holocaust&hl=en&ie=UTF-8


*******


"But revisionism has found its most congenial home where all rhetoric
flows free: the Internet. A furor has erupted recently over the
Worldwide Web page of Arthur Butz, a Northwestern University
engineering professor. He uses his home page--part of Northwestern's
Internet site--to broadcast his view that, as his 1976 book proclaims,
the Holocaust is the "hoax of the twentieth century." Northwestern
allows all of its faculty to place their home pages on the
university's web server and has refused pleas that it deny access to
Butz. Yet Butz is simply the most notorious of Holocaust deniers who
have appeared on the web; revisionist home pages puncture the network
like so many interwoven strands of barbed wire."

"To rebut the revisionists' claims, historians cite the testimony,
physical evidence, and pictures documenting the Holocaust. And,
indeed, the evidence is overwhelming. Yet the revisionists have
answers--fantastical as they are--to all of it. Thus, charge begets
response, and response begets rejoinder, until revisionist fantasies
have entered the arena of historical debate".

"No other historical event as recent and well documented--nor many far
more distant and ethereal--is subject to a similar dispute. One might
as well deny that World War II itself occurred or Vietnam or the last
presidential election. The revisionists rejoice in rebuttal, for point
and counterpoint is the way of historical argument. Yet this argument
cannot be won. For if rationality could convince, convincing would be
unnecessary and revisionism would not exist. Hatred and prejudice--the
only basis for Holocaust denial--do not respond to reason. To engage
in academic debate on the issue is to lend it a legitimacy it could
never earn on its own."

From "The Holocaust: denial and memory". The Humanist. (1997)
http://www.codoh.com/reference/holodenamem.html


********


"An Arab Voice Rejects Holocaust Denial". Middle East Media Research
Institute (2000) http://www.tzemachdovid.org/Facts/arabsonshoah.html


********


BOOKS:

"Denying History: Who Says the Holocaust Never Happened and Why Do
They Say It?" by Michael Shermer, Alex Grobman, Arthur Hertzberg.
Available at Amazon.com (with page excerpts)
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0520216121/002-0067427-5951203?v=glance#product-details


=============


umiat 

Google Search Strategy
did the holocaust happen?

---

Clarification of Answer by umiat-ga on 18 Oct 2003 13:31 PDT

I want to apologize for a very graphic picture that is included in one
of the articles in this answer. Unfortunately, the picture may be the
best means of portraying a horror that cannot be expressed in mere
words. My sincerest apologies to anyone whom I might have offended in
my haste to post a link that included this sickening portrayal of a
horrendous crime.

Sincerely,

umiat

I am requesting a refund because the answer given to me does not answer my
question. I asked to be informed of BOTH sides of the argument and was,
instead, only informed of one side and not the other.

Dear Despratin, 

I am not sure that there is a thing as "both sides of the issue",
since this is not an issue, or something that is a matter of opinion
and debate - this is a fact. I find it very sad, that an even that
happened less than 60 years ago, is even "debated" as a fact - given
that there are still live victims!

Denying or reducing this horrible event only serves hate, which is why
some people keep denying that .

The Mad Revisionist is a provocative site, meant to expose the
stupidity and hate behind the revisionist claims. The same "proofs"
they use to "show" that the Holocaust never happened could serve, to
the Mad Revisionist, to deny the existance of the moon, because it is
about the same level of facts:
The Moon : A Propaganda Hoax 
The Mad Revisionist 
http://www.revisionism.nl/Moon/The-Mad-Revisionist.htm

The Mad Revisionist site
http://www.reptiles.org/~madrev/The-Mad-Revisionist.htm

Yes, I have known and met scores of people whose families were killed
in the Holocaust, and many more who were persecuted and tortured.  You
probably know some yourself. You will not find another side for your
question, because it is not an "issue".

Despratin,
 I object to your statement that you did not receive both sides of the
argument concerning the Holocaust. Arguments agains the Holocaust
included the following references:

"A Revisionist Challenge to the US Holocaust Memorial Museum", by
Bradley Smith. (1997) http://www.codoh.com/ads/adschallenge.html
 
From Chapter 6. "The simplest argument against the extermination
thesis".  Holocaust Revisionism And its Political Consequences. Jürgen
Graf  (January 2001) http://www.ety.com/tell/books/jglife/06.htm

Read History of Holocaust Denial Arguments: 
 
"What is Holocaust Denial?" Shoah Resource Center 
http://www.yadvashem.org/odot/prog/index_before_change_table.asp?gate=5-35
 
Denying History: Who Says the Holocaust Never Happened and Why Do
They Say It?" by Michael Shermer, Alex Grobman, Arthur Hertzberg.
Available at Amazon.com (with page excerpts) 
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0520216121/002-0067427-5951203?v=glance#product-details

umiat

Reinhold Elstner's Final Message to Germany
From the Final Conflict Nationalist Newsletter:

http://dspace.dial.pipex.com/finalconflict/email.html

IN April 1995, Reinhold Elstner, a WW2 army German veteran, poured gasoline
over himself and committed suicide in Munich's busy city-centre Lenbach
Platz. He was a supporter of David Irving, had often written to him. He had
left behind an open letter explaining the reason for his terrible action
(which the cowardly German press largely ignored).

Reinhold Elstner's last letter, translated by Hans Schmidt:

Germans!

In Germany, in Austria, in Switzerland, and everywhere else in the world:
Please awaken!

50 years of never-ending defamation, ugly lies and the demonization of an
entire people are enough, 50 years of incredible insults to former German
soldiers, of blackmail that
costs billions, and of "democratic" hate, are more than one can take,
50 years of judicial Zionist revenge are sufficient,
50 years of trying to create rifts between generations of Germans by
criminalizing the fathers and grandfathers are too much.

It is incredible what we have to take in this anniversary year. A
Niagara-like flood of lies and defamations inundates us. Since I am now 75
years of age, I cannot do much anymore but I can still seek death by
self-immolation; one last deed that may act as a signal to the Germans to
regain their senses. Even if through my deed only one German will awaken,
and because of it will find the way to the truth, then my sacrifice will
not have been in vain.

I felt I had no other choice after I realized that now, after 50 years,
there seems a little hope that reason would gain the upper hand. As someone
who was driven from his home after the war, I always had one hope, that
that which was granted the Israelis after 2,000 years, namely the right to
return to "home" would also be granted German expellees. What happened to
the promise of self-determination that was promulgated in 1919, when
millions of Germans were forced to live under foreign rule? To this day we
have to suffer from these wrongs, and I can state that it wasn't the
Germans who can be held responsible for it.

I am a Sudeten German. I had a Czech grandmother, and from the other side
Czech and Jewish relatives, some of whom had been incarcerated in
concentration camps like Buchenwald, Dora (Nordhausen) and Theresienstadt.
I never belonged either to the Nazi party or even to any other group that
was in the slightest tainted by the association with national socialism. We
always had the best of relationship with our non-German kin, and, when
necessary, we helped each other. During the war, our food market with
bakery was responsible for the distribution of food stuffs to the French
POWs and Ostarbeiter living in the town. Everyone was dealt with fairly,
and this assured that at war's end our business was not plundered because
the French POWs guarded it until they were repatriated to their own
country. Our relatives who had been prisoners in the concentration camps
came already home on the 10th of May, 1945 (two days after the hostilities
had ceased), and offered their help. Of special assistance was the Jewish
uncle from Prague who in the Czech capital had seen the horrible blood bath
Czech partisans had caused among the Germans left there. The horror of
these cold-blooded killings could still be seen in the man's eyes,
obviously a horror the likes of which this former prisoner of the Reich had
not experienced during his incarceration.
I was a soldier of the Wehrmacht of the Greater German Reich, fighting,
from day one on the Eastern front. To this one must add a few years of
slave work as a POW in the Soviet Union.

I well remember the Kristallnacht of 1938 because on that day I met a
crying Jewish girl, a girl with whom I had been studying. But I was much
more shocked when I saw in Russia how all churches had been desecrated, how
they were used for stables and machine shops; I saw the pigs grunt, sheep
bleat, machines hammering in holy places. Yet, for me the worst was when I
saw churches being used as museums for atheism. And all this occurred with
the active connivance of the Jews, that very small minority of which so
many members were the executing goons of Stalin. Foremost amongst these
people was the Kaganovich clan, seven brothers and sisters, who were such
mass murderers that alleged SS-killers can be called harmless by comparison.

After I was permitted to go "home" after my discharge from Russian POW
camps (what a mockery to say to go "home" to a POW who has been expelled
from his ancestral homeland), I heard for the first time of the brutalities
of the German concentration camps but at first nothing of any gas chambers
and of the killing of human beings through the use of poison gas. On the
contrary, I was told that the concentration camps at Theresienstadt and
Buchenwald (Dora) even had bordellos for the inmates within the confines of
the camp. Then, on the occasion of the "Auschwitz trials", and not only at
the Nürnberg trials, Herr Broszat of the "Institute for Modern History"
stated that the famous "six million" figure is only a symbolic number. In
spite of the fact that Herr Broszat had also declared that there had been
no gas chambers used for the killing of human beings in any camps on German
Reich soil, for years alleged gas chambers were shown to visitors at
Buchenwald, Dachau, Mauthausen, and the like. Lies, nothing but lies to
this day.

Everything became very clear to me when I read dozens of books written by
Jews and so-called anti-fascists. In addition, I was able to draw upon my
own experience in Russia. I lived for two years in the hospital town of
Porchov, where already in the first winter the danger of typhus epidemic
arose, and all the hospitals and first-aid stations were deloused with what
we called then "K.Z.Gas" (concentration camp gas), namely "Zyklon-B". There
I learned how dangerous it was to handle this poison gas even though I did
not belong to the teams that defumigated the buildings. At any rate, ever
since then I have had no choice but to regard all concentration camp
memoirs that describe the alleged "gas chambers" as fairy tales. This may
be the real reason why all concentration camp reports (by the victims, the
translator) are being accepted as true under a so-called "Judicial notice"
and need not to be proven.

In 1988 the German TV brought a report on Babi Yar (the ravine near Kiev in
the Ukraine, the translator) where it was stated that the SS had killed
36,000 Jews by stoning them. Three years later, a Mrs. Kayser wrote a
report for the newspaper "tz" in Munich stating that these Jews had been
killed by shooting, and that their bodies had then been burned in the deep
crevasses. Asked about it, Dr. Kayser pointed to a bookstore in Konstanz
that sells the book "Shoa at Babi Yar". On the day that book arrived at my
home, the German TV brought a report from Kiev telling of the findings of a
Ukrainian commission: at Babi Yar where the remains of about 180,000
murdered human beings, all killed on orders of Stalin (before 1941, the
translator). The Germans were not responsible at all. But everywhere in the
world one can still find Babi Yar monuments blaming the Germans for the
killings there. (Note by the translator: President Clinton visited Babi Yar
on 10 May 1995, and spoke, in front of a menorah, of the Jews the Germans
had allegedly killed there. An outright lie.)

Due to the facts as told by Herr Broszat, that we had been lied about the
occurrences in a dozen concentration camps, I myself am unwilling to
believe the fairy tales that are being told about the alleged happenings in
the camps in Poland. I also do not believe the postwar accusations that we
Germans are particularly aggressive. After all, it was Germany that kept
the peace from 1871 to 1914, while England and France, the foremost
democracies, conquered most of Africa and expanded their colonies in Asia.
At the same time America fought Spain and Mexico, and Russia battled Turkey
and Japan. In these matters I consider the government of the United States
particular cynical since it was that country which twice this century
crossed the ocean to attack Germany and turn us towards "democracy". One
must consider that this was a government whose nation eradicated the
original inhabitants, and to this day treats its black population as second
class citizens.

During my years I met nice and helpful Jews not only among my relatives but
also as a POW in Russia. In Gorki a female Jewish professor helped me back
to health when I suffered from pleurisy and severe eye problems. But I also
had heard many bad things about this small minority. Did not Churchill
write in the London Sunday Herald ( 8 February 1920) as follows:

"From the days of the Spartakus Weishaupt to Marx, Trotzky, Bela Khun, Rosa
Luxembourg and Emma Goldmann, there is a worldwide conspiracy busy to
destroy our civilization, and to change our society on the basis of
unhampered developments of ugly greed, and an impossible dream of equality
of all. This conspiracy with its relentless undermining of every existing
institution was able to engage a gang of unscrupulous people from the
underworld of the larger cities of Europe and America to take over Russia,
and make itself masters of this large empire. It is not necessary to
overestimate the role which these godless Jews played in the establishment
of Bolshevism."

I hope I am entitled to quote the recipient of the prestigious German
Karls-Prize. [With this sentence Mr. Elstner alluded to the fact that in
"free" and "democratic" Germany there are now many taboos in force,
particularly in the political and historical fields. Even quoting
Churchill's sentences from 1920 may land a person in jail for "inciting
hate against another group", namely, the Jews. The truth of a statement is
no defense. -- The translator]. In the XVIIIth Century, Samuel Johnson
wrote: "I am not certain what we should fear more, a street full of
soldiers who are out to plunder, or a room full of writers who are used to
lie."

Considering our experience After 1918 and after 1945, we Germans ought to
know what we have to fear most!

München, 25 April 1995

Reinhold Elstner