Calling all Debunkers, and anyone who thinks Holocaust Denial is offensive, debunk this!

Hitler and Eugenics


"The world thought Hitler was mad, but the concept of a white, blond-haired, blue-eyed master Nordic race was not Adolf Hitler’s. The idea was created in the United States at least two decades before Hitler came to power. In fact, in 1924, when Hitler wrote Mein Kampf, he frequently quoted American eugenics and displayed a thorough knowledge. “There is today one state, Hitler wrote, in which at least weak beginnings toward a better conception [of immigration] are noticeable. Of course, it is not our model German Republic, but the United States." Hitler told his fellow Nazis that he closely followed American eugenic legislation. “I have studied with great interest the laws of several American states concerning prevention of reproduction by people whose progeny would, in all probability, be of no value or be injurious to the racial stock.”

During the beginning of the third Reich, eugenicists across America welcomed Hitler’s plans as the logical implementation of their own research. Ten years after Virginia passed its 1924 sterilization act, Joseph DeJarnette, superintendent of Virginias Western State Hospital, complained in the Richmond Times-Dispatch, “The Germans are beating us at our own game.”


In 1934, the number of sterilizations in Germany was accelerating beyond 5,000 per month. Beginning in 1940, thousands of Germans were taken from homes for the elderly, mental institutions and other state ran institutions and was systematically gassed. In all, between 50,000 and 100,000 were killed.

Number of sterilized from each condition

Hereditary feeble-mindedness: 200,000

Schizophrenia: 80,000

Epilepsy: 60,000

Manic-depressive psychosis: 20,000

Serious physical deformities: 20,000

Hereditary deafness: 16,000

Hereditary alcoholism:10,000

Hereditary blindness: 4,000

Huntington's chorea: 600

TOTAL: 410,600


Hitler’s believed that Jewish were racially inferior. They played a decisive role in social degeneracy, such as prostitution, pornography, modern art, financial crimes, and the narcotics trade. Jewish people possessed no ethics or morality and that they had been engaged in a 4,000-year-old conspiracy to dominate the world pursuant to their view of themselves as the chosen people. Just like other eugenicists, Hitler believe that these characteristics and values were in the genes of the Jewish people, and therefore are able to be eradicated from the general population (cf. generally Mein Kampf). Hitler's made his threat to exterminate European Jewry was made to the Reichstag on January 30, 1939: “In the course of my life I have often been a prophet, and have usually been ridiculed for it . . . If the international Jewish financiers in and outside Europe should succeed in plunging the nations once more into a world war, then the result will not be the Bolshevisation of the earth, and thus the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation [Vernichtung] of the Jewish race in Europe”
Hitler attempted to succeed in this goal by annihilating hundreds of thousands of the Jewish population in concentration camps using the American favored method of extermination of the gas chambers. There were also rumors that Hitler made Lebensborn a "stud farms" where SS men and suitable young women were mated to breed a master race. However this is nothing more than a myth. Lebensborn was in fact a conservative institution with a conservative sexual code, attempting to maintain middle-class respectability.


The connection between the American Eugenics movement and the Nazi eugenic movement was further solidified in the Nuremburg trials that judged the crimes committed by the Nazis during the war. In their defense the Nazis quoted Oliver Wendell Holmes from the infamous 1927 Buck v. Bell trial. Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote, “It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind . . . Three generations of imbeciles are enough.”


This information was taken from www.freerepublic.com... and www.trueorigin.org...


BUT...


We must not overlook the History of Zionist Eugenic Policies in Israel

ce399.typepad.com...

And we must not forget on August 14, at 9 PM, Israel's Channel Ten television screened a documentary film which exposes the ugliest secret of Israel's Labor party founders: the deliberate mass radiation poisoning of nearly 100,00 Sephardi youths of a generation.

To fool the parents of the victims, the children were taken away on "school trips" and their parents were later told the x-rays were a treatment for the scourge of scalpal ringworm. 6,000 of the children died shortly after their doses were given, while many of the rest developed cancers that killed thousands over time and are still killing them now. While living, the victims suffered from disorders such as epilepsy, amnesia, Alzheimer's disease, chronic headaches and psychosis.

We must also remember that the Zionist response to the Gestapo's offer was made with the full knowledge that the alternative to this offer was the gas chamber.
These treacherous Zionist leaders betrayed their own flesh and blood.

So, who are the guilty parties?

Did Six Million Really Die?
by Richard E. Harwood
link
A fairly lengthy and detailed analysis on the Holocaust that addresses much of what has come up here already.
Chapter 9 even goes into some detail on the Red Cross, which has been brought up several times in this thread.
9. THE JEWS AND THE CONCENTRATION CAMPS: A FACTUAL APPRAISAL BY THE RED CROSS
It goes much deeper than how accurate the death totals where from the Red Cross angle.

Originally posted by ken10

But what if the bigger picture was the original intention to send all these jews to Palestine to create the Zionist state that is Israel.

I don't think any jews who had successful businesses would have voluntarily packed up to start afresh in a Desert........And i don't think a state could be justified for just a few.

Just more things to consider.

Well not too many made it did they hehe...

That could have been the plan, but it didn't play out like that, and the Nazi propaganda against them was extremely bad to suggest that really wasn’t the true plan.

[edit on 14-8-2010 by Xtrozero]

reply to post by Xtrozero

Well not too many made it did they hehe... That could have been the plan, but it didn't play out like that, and the Nazi propaganda against them was extremely bad to suggest that really wasn’t the true plan.

Well lets see what has the truer ring of "Genocide",

(1) The collecting of a group of people, who had their heads shaved and their clothes fumigated to prevent disease.

(2) The Deliberate targeting of the general population of Germany, with the indiscriminate carpet bombing of its major cities by the British.

And which has the truer ring of a "holocaust",

(1) The Gassing and cremation of some peoples (though hotly debated), but from which there are many survivors.

(2) The deliberate use of Nuclear devices on a general populace, Knowing it would incinerate many tens of thousands of innocent peoples Instantly.
(No Debate needed)

Originally posted by neformore

Originally posted by LordBucket
If you keep telling people that they hate jews, eventually they might start to believe you.

Heres a list of genocides in history

Show me a thread on ATS that claims the numbers were less than stated for any other genocide except the holocaust in WW2.

There is a reason why you can't, and its nothing to do with "accuracy".

Ireland is not on that list.So I guess nobody must have died there or if they did it was by completely natural causes.

Some acts of genocide need to be recognised as such.Then we can start arguing over figures.

www.law.com... ent_Violation

The Jewish community does not own the intellectual proprietary rights to human suffering.

Having Jewish and Irish ancestry ,this is not lost on me.I hear Irish famine jokes,Irish stupidity jokes,Irish drunk jokes etc here in this country directed at descendants and actual Irish visitors, on a regular basis.Nobody flips out about it do they?
There's a double standard here.And it seems no matter who you substitute the Irishman with ,in this equation,the standard remains.

www.rense.com...

That should put some perspective into the Hologram.... I mean Holocaust.

We discussed this thread on ATS Live! last night.

You can hear the show on the REWIND! Player here

reply to post by ken10


It is difficult to judge the legitimacy about this video as previous posters mention the sunlight shadow does not change much and even if that is Zyklon-B, how do we now the people in the room did not have filters under their masks?

I would like to see an official study with documented information regarding it as this would be more trust -worthy.

reply to post by neformore



Maybe i missed something, But from what i heard, the topic of the radio show was : Nazi's and Nazi worship.

So is this your way of saying anyone who questions any aspect of the holocaust is a Nazi Worshipper ?

reply to post by s7ryk3r

I would like to see an official study with documented information regarding it as this would be more trust -worthy.

I agree with you,

However i don't think that would be possible in a lot of countries, Due to current holocaust denial laws !!!

Update… After a weekend of extended reading and browsing I was able to gain a bit more insight into the subject. Following I will try to state the questions brought up from memory and will try to answer them.
Fellow ATS user Ken10 suggested that Zyklon B is not operational under 25 degrees Celsius, since that is the stated evaporation point of hydrocyanic acid.

Now, quite simply, this turns out not to be true. It’s best to go back to a work by Degesch (Zyklon-B-manufacturer) CEO, Dr. Gerhard Friedrich Peters, to clear this up: A paper called The Efficiency of Prussic Acid Fumigation at Low Temperatures, from 1941.

www.holocaust-history.org...

[…]Nachdem sich bei zahlreichen Durchgasungsobjekten aus der üblichen Beobachtung heraus bereits Gewißheit über den 100-prozentigen Abtötungserfolg auch bei Raumtemperaturen bis -10°C ergeben hatte, wurden in einigen dafür besonders geeigneten Kasernengebäuden die obigen Fragen eingehender geprüft. Nachfolgend seien einige der Untersuchungsergebnisse zusammengestellt.[..]

Translation by Nichirasu:

[…]After the observation made on numerous “Durchgasungsobjekte” that the 100% kill-rate can also be observed by room temperatures down to -10 degrees Celsius, additional tests were made in Garrison facilities that were especially useful for this purpose, above questions have been reviewed more thoroughly. Following a composition of these Test-results can be found.[..]

So there we have it. This is the Geschäftsleiter (CEO) of the manufacturer of Zyklon B, categorically stating that Zyklon B is effective 100% down to -10 degrees Celsius and that this has been tested. The same is stated in his other, more general work on the history of the use of hydrocyanic acid.

Fellow ATS user PeopleVSNWO has presented Mattogno’s (holocaust denier) claim that there was simply not enough fuel (coke) delivered to Auschwitz in order to cremate the number of people claimed by the “official” story.

I have already made the following points regarding this claim:

- That coke consumption is not a definitive indicator of how many corpses could be burned, since i) there was the extended use of open-pit burning and ii) the exact conditions of how the corpses were handled, what fuel was used were not easily established.

I would wish to add the following after my reading:

Mattogno’s claim is that coke consumption needed in order to burn one corpse fully is around 15kg, while traditional historians like Zimmerman operate with numbers around 3.5 kg

vho.org...
Even supposing that the second muffle did not consume heat, the cremation of two cadavers would on average have needed 15 [=30 ÷ 2] kg of coke.

Zimmerman imagines that the average coke consumption of "about 3.5 kilograms per body" depends on "multiple" cremations, which, according to the data in Bischoff's letter of 28 June 1943, means that the Birkenau ovens cremated four cadavers in a single muffle in one hour.

Mattogno claims that a coke consumption of 15 kg/corpse is not consistent with the documents he has in his possession regarding coke deliveries to Auschwitz.

I would like to add the following things:

- Mattogno does not share these documents. No one else has ever seen them; though he does quote them on request. This is not to say that they don’t exist. But in science, reproducibility is one of the fundamental tenets. As long as Mattogno does not openly share these documents there is no possibility to take a look at them and determine how convincing his interpretation of them is. Traditional historians share their materials openly after publishing in order to allow other historians to look at the materials and determine their scientific merit. Only by such discussion and peer review is there true progress in science.

- The baseline against which we are able to compare the cremation methods implemented by the Nazis at Auschwitz is principally skewed. This skewdness stems from the following points:

i) The uniqueness of the ovens at Auschwitz

ii) The uniqueness of the situation at Auschwitz

iii) The uniqueness of the state of the corpses burned at Auschwitz

Now this may seem like a simple cop-out but this is an immensely important point. Never again in history has anything along these lines been done again. There was no subsequent event that involved the burning of corpses in the manner the Nazis did nor in those quantities.

Our baseline for cremations are cremations that are done in a manner dictated by piety and an oven-to-corpse-ratio that is never tilted to the corpse side as it was at Auschwitz. The goal of such cremations is to respectfully reduce a corpse to a neat pile of ashes that is aesthetically acceptable to the recipients of the urn. Utmost care is made in the designs of the ovens to prevent i) direct contact with the corpses by flames and ii) the remaining of bone and other residue in the ash pile.

The Nazis faced no such restrictions. They did not want to cremate their victims but simply to reduce the corpses to a state more suited for easy disposal. Arguably, you can transport the remains of thousands such corpses with one truckload while you can only transport hundreds of corpses in one. This point is especially pertinent when it comes to the question of the burning of multiple corpses per muffle.
Fellow ATS user PeopleVSNWO has made the suggestion that using such a method would not reduce the overall fuel consumption of the crematoria. It is very hard to find materials on this question, and my contacting the local national association of the crematoria industry didn’t yield big results up to now because all of the ovens used here are power electrically, not by other fuels. They were nice enough to direct me to an expert of them that is old enough to be familiar with older procedures, such as coke-fired-ovens. I’m bent on questioning him more thoroughly and will try to secure his cooperation with answering these questions.
So far I can only elaborate on the preliminary points I was able to clear. Accordingly. Coke consumption can be reduced by putting multiple corpses into one muffle if the goal is not cremation (i.e.: having a nice pile of clean ashes) but simply reducing the corpse to a kind of blob. This is especially interesting because it coincides with testimonies of putting up to 4 corpses in one muzzle.

As to the uniqueness of the situation: Of course there were other cases where the need arose to cremate many corpses with limited crematoria capacity. But in those situations piety and the question of remains were still central inhibitors to implementing such drastic measures as used by the Nazis. Never again were so many corpses disposed of in such a way. The technical and psychological knowledge the Nazis acquired by implementing these methods are by definition quite restricted: Who else would know about the exact details when no one ever reproduced their efforts?

And one word to the uniqueness of the corpses. The majority of graphic and oral evidence as to the facts of every-day life in Auschwitz lead us to the conclusion that everyone safe for the SS guards, other personnel and selected inmate populations like those of “Kanada” were severely malnourished, even those forced laborers that held jobs deemed “essential for the war”. It is reasonable to assume that the average corpse weighed no more than 80 to 120 pounds. Such corpses will necessarily have a different “burning rate” than what subsequent crematoria have had to deal with in situations of peace. In this respect it is simply dishonest to compare Auschwitz-“cremations” to a baseline derived from civilian, peace-time data. Documentary and oral evidence also points us to the fact that the majority of those inmates selected for gassing were women and children. It is quite clear that fuel consumption in these circumstances necessarily differs from the baseline used by deniers and traditional historians.

A last word on eyewitness evidence: Some members have alluded to the apparent lack of eyewitness testimony regarding the gassings and the cremation process. From what I have learned this weekend, the corpses in the crematoria were handled by a special selection of inmates, called the "Sonderkommando". Their names were not separately documented and probably this unit was subject to the same fluctuations as other special inmate units. From the few testimonies that are available, their number is estimated around 100 people.
According to them, only 4 SS guards supervised this process at any given occasion. So there really aren’t that many witnesses to go around; especially when the testimony of the occasional visitor who witnessed such goings-on (like, f.e. Himmler) is disregarded as “coerced testimony after the fact”.


[edit on 16-8-2010 by NichirasuKenshin]

PeopleVSNWO has also claimed that, even when reduced to ashes, the existence of the reputed corpses should be demonstrateable.

To this I would like to answer that i) by testimony of eyewitnesses and people involved we know that they widely dispersed the remains, eventually preferably settling on the discarding the remains into the nearby rivers (of which there were many).

Nonetheless, the existence of such remains has been materially proven by experimental drilling, known under the name of “Hydrokop Drillings”, referring to the company that drilled the holes.

www.nizkor.org...

PeopleVSNWO has also stated that open pit burnings were not possible at Auschwitz because the water ground level was too high at the site. To this I would like to answer that, among the many activities of the forced laborers, the building of drainage canals and dams was one of the most prominent. Large areas inside and outside of the compound were drained step by step in the 6 year history of the camp, and the success of these measures is attested by Hoess and others.

Fellow ATS member Ken10 has suggested that experiments as to the lethality of Zyklon B could easily end the debate but that such experiments are impossible due to Holocaust denier laws. Here is his post:

However i don't think that would be possible in a lot of countries, Due to current holocaust denial laws !!!

In the video it is claimed that a “Dr.” is on scene. No professional medical expert in the world would participate in such an experiment, as doing so would violate the Hippocratic principles under which he operates. Such behavior would make any Doctor almost anywhere subject to revocation of his license… Maybe this fact, and not the Holocaust Denial Laws that you suggest, explain why such experiments are not made?

The same can be said for any and all other scientific experiments. There’s probably not one University in the world were an ethics commission would agree to such experiments. Such experiments are forbidden and therefore absent from the scientific debate because they violate the very foundation of science. No reasonable university would fund such an experiment, not because they fear the truth but because – gladly – their moral compass forbids them to endanger anyone for the gain of such a simple insight that anyone with a basic training in chemistry can provide.

Originally posted by mazzroth
www.rense.com...

That should put some perspective into the Hologram.... I mean Holocaust.

Some comments on the horrible Rense-link you provided.

The overall gist of that piece, for people who refuse to read such garbage, is that “Auschwitz” was a normal camp like any other. It tries to prove this by citing anecdotes from the everyday-life in the camps, such as
- There was a swimming pool
- There was a brothel
- There was an orchestra and a theater group.

I will note the following points: No one has ever claimed that Auschwitz was a single purpose extermination camp. Such descriptions are only accurate when applied to the Reinhard camps such as Belzec and Sobibor. Those were truly “factories of extermination” – small compounds that existed for almost no other reason but for their role as killing stations.

But Auschwitz was, firstly and most importantly, a large slave labor facility. This is often demonstrated with a comment on the ridiculously large IG-Farben facility at Monowitz, but that is by far not the whole picture. Large parts of the forced laborers worked on agricultural projects outside of the camps, some of them producing for markets (they never saw the fruits of their labor) and other producing products for science. This was the primary purpose of Auschwitz – and indeed, this is what the first prisoners, about 20,000 poles deemed to be dangerous to the Nazis experienced. The people so employed were the people with the famous” tattoos”. The people selected for gassing came from this labor population – if they were sick or to weakly to work. In addition to these people Auschwitz at times received large transports of non-polish Jews to be “Sonderbehandelt” of which the majority – especially children and women – was selected for gassing immediately.

The people that went from the trains to the gas chambers or to waiting areas where they were soon to be gassed did not get any tattoos and neither their names nor their composition was ever documented by the Nazis. This is a point where another of the denier-argument comes crashing down: Not everyone entering Auschwitz was tattooed and recorded; so basing victim numbers solely on tattooed numbers and Auschwitz-documentation will necessarily bring up numbers that are too low to explain what happened to the people documented to be transported there.

As for the swimming pool: There is no testimony of any regular inmate having a nice day and going for a swim. The pool was a modified water reservoir and was reserved for SS guards and the occasional inmate with preferential status. Such inmates were never Jews. As I pointed out above, there was always a substantial non-Jewish inmate population, especially among the more privileged labor force and the so called capos. These were also the only persons who came to enjoy the brothel and the limited cultural activities of the camp. These were programs to enhance the efficiency of that part of the labor population that, unlike the Jews, was not going to be killed anyway.

The same goes for the other amenities noted such as money: These were not regular, day-to-day items for the lowest hierarchical stage of the inmates (Jews, Soviet Soldiers, etc.) but incentives given to those inmates deemed worthy to live (non-Jews, mild political opponents etc.) who were on a higher hierarchical level. It is, quite honestly, a simple lie propagated by deniers that any and all inmates had access to the various “amenities” listed in such links as the one you posted.




[edit on 16-8-2010 by NichirasuKenshin]

reply to post by NichirasuKenshin


OK hold onto your hat, I have just listened to some absolutely incredible information this afternoon about this subject matter. In a near synchronous moment the information found its way to me via a download from a radio torrent site of a radio host I had never heard of ( I listen to dozens of them ).

What this radio host forwarded is astounding, I will briefly give an outline of his claims.

1. Hitler and his party colluded with Zionist's and through this document called "The Transfer Agreement" they relocated Jews from Europe to Palestine to give them their Homeland.

2. The Zionist's then betrayed Hitler after he was used up and to make the Deal legitimate they sided up to the Allies and used the Nuremberg trials to seal the deal for sympathy for Jews and instigate foundations for the nation of Israel.

3. The real war atrocity's were the Dresden fire bombing, Hiroshima and Nagasaki but they were not discussed at Nuremberg. That in fact the 2 main scientist's involved in making the Nuclear Bombs were Jewish.

4. Its ok to be Anti-Semite if you are demonizing the Semitic Arabs of the Middle East, but say anything about the Semitic Jews and you have a plethroa of Departments attack you.

5. History has been re-written to stop you from questioning the lies and now they have to make laws to prevent Israel from being seen as illegitimate Internationally.

Originally posted by mazzroth


1. Hitler and his party colluded with Zionist's and through this document called "The Transfer Agreement" they relocated Jews from Europe to Palestine to give them their Homeland.

The transfer agreement was one of many schemes considered by Nazis and Zionists to rid Germany (and, or Europe) of its Jewish population. Hannah Arendt has written about this in the 50's, so it is known since then. The best account of this story is in Edwin Black's "The transfer agreement".

There's nothing in dispute as far as this story goes.

Basically, the transfer agreement worked because it i) was not intended for all Jews ii) it was reserved for wealthy Jews willing to let go of a substantial part of their own holdings iii) it was a money making scheme for the Nazis.

These points are crucial: Because yes, the Nazis would have probably agreed to a deal that would have rid Germany of its Jewish population. The big problem was the money - by 1934 Hjalmar Schacht and other economists in Nazi Germany had presented Hitler and the Nazis leadership with studies that showed that Germany was not able to survive the exfiltration of all Jews and their holdings financially. This was why the Transfer agreement was accepted while other schemes where Germany would have been the net payer were abandoned. This means as much that only relatively wealthy Jews could participate in it - the great majority of the German Jews did not have the means to part with their holdings in order emigrate - hence the transer agreement was never a scheme to exfiltrate ALL german/eruopean Jews.

2. The Zionist's then betrayed Hitler after he was used up and to make the Deal legitimate they sided up to the Allies and used the Nuremberg trials to seal the deal for sympathy for Jews and instigate foundations for the nation of Israel.

Actually that's not exactly what happened. Yes, in the beginning some Zionists had the hope that the Nazi desire to rid Germany of Jews would be so strong that a transfer agreement scheme could be implemented even when the German state would play the role of net payer. This proved to be untrue; the Nazis did not have the financial means nor the willingness to let all Jews and their holdings go. From then on the question for the Nazis was: How can we get rid of the German Jews WITHOUT letting them take their assets with them?

The transfer agreement was not suited for such a situation as it was profitably to the Nazis - one of the main reasons they agreed to it. (Hint: Devisenmangel!!!!!!!)

3. The real war atrocity's were the Dresden fire bombing, Hiroshima and Nagasaki but they were not discussed at Nuremberg. That in fact the 2 main scientist's involved in making the Nuclear Bombs were Jewish.

The Nuclear bomb was designed by the resources of GB and the US, using the brain power of literally thousands of people. To claim that the nuclear bomb is "jewish" or a "jewish invention" is bad history at best....

In fact, at the absolute maximum 25.000 people died in Dresden. This was confirmed by local Nazi officials as well as the most recent, comprehensive study by a commission of historians as of this year.

The most deadly bomber attack short of nuclear bomb was made over Tokyo on 9–10 March 1945; deaths are estimated at 100.000 although these numbers have not been confirmed as thoroughly as the Dresden numbers have been.

4. Its ok to be Anti-Semite if you are demonizing the Semitic Arabs of the Middle East, but say anything about the Semitic Jews and you have a plethroa of Departments attack you.

I wouldn't know about that, and, quite frankly this seems rather off-topic to me. I'll be happy to contribute opinions on this subject in a thread about that topic.

5. History has been re-written to stop you from questioning the lies and now they have to make laws to prevent Israel from being seen as illegitimate Internationally.

No law can prevent my seeing Israel as basically illegitmate in its current form. This however, has absolutely nothing to do with the question of wheter the Holocaust happened or not.

The topic of this thread is Holocaust Denial, especially the "arguments" made by Zundel and Cole in the cited videos - most of which have been adressed in this thread. Feel free to watch the videos and bring up any claims made therein for discussion. Let's not derail this thread, ok?

[edit on 18-8-2010 by NichirasuKenshin]

I don't think that anyone can really deny that the holocaust actually occurred. The discrepancies clearly arise when you analyze actual numbers.

Keep in mind that the Nazis imprisoned a wide array of people and not just jews. They imprisoned repeat criminal offenders, homosexuals, political opposition, religious opposition, POW's, and simply foreign nationals.

They needed these people to work in forced labor conditions to advance the German war effort. Just read up on camps like Mauthausen an its 40 plus sub units which were run like industrial machines.

An estimated 197,464 prisoners passed through the Mauthausen camp system between August 1938 and May 1945. At least 95,000 died there. More than 14,000 were Jewish.

Lets all agree that atrocities occurred at the hands of the Nazis to all that they imprisoned.

Imagine dying like this:

Another killing method, favored by the SS during the winter season, was to gather a group of prisoners in the garage yard and order them to undress. A guard then sprayed water over the group which was left to freeze to death. This was quite effective in a region where the winter temperature usually was around minus 10 degrees Celsius.

I'd rather be gassed to death.

www.jewishgen.org...

reply to post by NichirasuKenshin


Nichirasu Kenshin, thank you so much for your excellent posts here!

Incidently, I'm neither Jewish nor Christian (I don't belong to any organized religion -- although I believe in God as the supreme organizing intelligence of the universe).

Since you're a serious scholar, I respect your opinion on the Holocaust.

Can you recommend good general books on the Holocaust for lay people?

I can see how difficult it is to come up with an accurate number of Jews murdered in the Holocaust. I agree the figure is in the multi-millions.

Has any scholar tried to come up with an accurate number of murdered Jews?

SeaWind

Originally posted by SeaWind
reply to post by NichirasuKenshin

 

Nichirasu Kenshin, thank you so much for your excellent posts here!

Well, thank you very much for taking an interest!

Incidently, I'm neither Jewish nor Christian (I don't belong to any organized religion -- although I believe in God as the supreme organizing intelligence of the universe).

Neither am I. As far as I am concerned, Bokononism is the only true religion!

Since you're a serious scholar, I respect your opinion on the Holocaust.

Although to be fair - as I have pointed out many times, I myself do not work in actual research and I do not professionaly deal with either the second world war or the Holocaust.

Can you recommend good general books on the Holocaust for lay people?

It depends on how extensive a book you imagine. I personally like Raul Hilberg's works very much but I bet there are more concise and more up-to-date-books.

From my view point, the real horror and significance of the Holocaust is in the details. The only part that I have extensive knowledge about are the medical experiments. When you narrow your interest down to such a specific topic then it is easier to find concise and precise works on the subject. The Holocaust as a whole is such an overwhelming subject that the details grow sketchy pretty quickly if you read a standard work such as Hilberg's.

I can see how difficult it is to come up with an accurate number of Jews murdered in the Holocaust. I agree the figure is in the multi-millions.

Has any scholar tried to come up with an accurate number of murdered Jews?

SeaWind

Well... That's hard to answer. There is a constant revision of numbers of the individual places - the camps, the massacre sites etc. so the "most up to date, most exact numer" is changing rapidly. But historiography in general has turned away from the actual process of adding up the numbers that individual research brings forth.

The reason for this, IMHO is that the overall number of Jews killed can be derived thorugh 2 ways. The first is to consult the demographic situation before and after the war, and such a search yeilds a result of about 5 to 6 million missing (depending on the combination of sources used).

The other approach is to simply add up all the numbers of individual actions. If you do this roughly, you will also end up in the 4,5 to 6 million region (again, depending on the composition of sources) so there is a general correlation.
But the thing with this counting is: No historian will ever suggest that a number he brought forward is the absolute truth. Missing records, unknown actions, diseases, homicides apart from Nazi-inflicted terror etc. are all impossible to be quantified in entirety. "Figuring out the exact number" as in figuring out the actual, true number of victims without leaving out or adding any is basically impossible - and this is the main reason why there is very little systematic, academic adding up of individual numbers. What counts from this perspective is the correlation between the results of both approaches described above, not that we will ever be at a point were we will know what happened to any and all of the individuals unlucky enough to get caught up in the Nazi nightmare.

But if you're interested in the debate about the current numbers, Axis history forum has some discussion on the topic as well as the Holocaust controversies blog - both sources that for the most part give you the tools to verify what they write for yourself.

Thank you for you encouragment. Greetings, Nichirasu.