Når du aktivt beskylder meg for å være nazist så er det et personagrep uavhengig av hvor mange PMer du har fått.
Det kan nevnes at også jeg har fått honnører for det jeg har skrevet i denne tråden ut at det er et argument for noe som helst.
Det kan ikke sammenlignes. Her er det snakk om en uformell tråd og ikke et faglig arbeid. Selvfølgelig må man i et faglig arbeid, det være seg juridisk eller ellers, kildebelegge påstander.
I en debatt på et forum som dette burde man ha en noe løsere tone.
Hadde jeg sagt "det finnes ingen gasskamre" så er dette korrekt.
Men det har jeg ikke sagt.
Jeg har sagt "Germar Rudolf hevder at gassing umulig kunne ha funnet sted" hvorpå du skal ha bevis for at han faktisk har sagt det.
Det er å være vrang.
1) Det er ikke et personangrep mot deg når jeg påpeker at dine nazi-beskyldninger er et personangrep mot meg..
2) Det er ikke et personangrep å påstå at det er usaklig og umodent å komme med personangrep
3) Hvis ikke du hadde tatt initativet til personangrep hadde ikke jeg behøvd å påpeke din umodenhet.
Når jeg sier at det du skriver her, sammenlagt med det du har skrevet andre steder slår an en brun tone er det en observasjon. Om du ikke tåler at man gjør observasjoner bør du muligens holde deg unna diskusjoner du selv beskylder andre for ikke å ha mage til?
Videre gjør du det ganske enkelt for deg selv ved å innta "jeg har ingen mening"-standpunktet, det er en ganske gammel og velprøvd teknikk det. Avslutningsvis kan man vel bare nevne at de _aller_ fleste fora, også her, har ganske strenge dokumentasjonskrav på diskusjoner av seriøs art. Både til medisinske artikler når det gjelder trening og her historikere av en hvis troverdighet.. Jeg kan også grave opp en mengde "historikere" som sier sitt og har en mengde publikasjoner. Man kan ganske enkelt se på Finkelstein som et godt eksempel.. Det han skriver har gjentatte ganger blitt tilbakevist..
Videre, når det gjelder bevisbyrde har man sagt det bedre før:
Holocaust denial is widely viewed as unreasonable because it fails to adhere to rules for the treatment of evidence, rules that are recognized as basic to rational inquiry.
To support a proposition or allegation, a claimant must offer evidence. The merits of this evidence, and the conclusion it can support, will depend on its nature; for example, hearsay would not normally be considered good evidence, but an eyewitness account would be. A second-hand story would not, but an official, dated and signed document testifying to the alleged incident would be. After evidence has been adduced, the claimant's case is then considered to have been made, and the evidence can be evaluated. The claimant's burden of proof has been carried. If an interlocutor would then like to call the claimant's evidence into question, that interlocutor will have to make a claim of his own -- for example, that this or that piece of evidence is a forgery. The burden of proof then shifts to the interlocutor, and the standard of proof will be commensurate with the surety with which the original claim was established. The claimant's evidence has, prima facie, whatever force it has in virtue of its merit as evidence. The interlocutor can't simply continue demanding more proof to answer any conceivable skeptical conjecture or hypothetical possibility he can invent to challenge the claimant; this raises the claimant's burden of proof to an unreasonable level.
In the case of the Holocaust, the survivors, eye witnesses, and historians may collectively be considered the claimants. The prevailing consensus among the informed is that their evidence[7] is overwhelming, and that it proves beyond a reasonable doubt that the Holocaust occurred[8], and that it occurred as they say it occurred. It is unreasonable to ask the claimants to prove that their evidence is "really real" any more than they already have, unless there is some particular demonstrably credible reason for thinking that it is suspect.[9] If Holocaust deniers would like to cast doubt on this evidence, the burden of proof shifts to them, and they will have a very high standard to meet. They would have to prove, at least with a balance of probabilities, that the greater part of the entire body of evidence attesting to the Holocaust has been fabricated, misrepresented, or misconstrued by thousands upon thousands of critical evaluators. Until they can do that, they have not satisfied the rules for the treatment of evidence recognized to be integral to reason. In the meantime, Holocaust denial will continue to be recognized as an unreasonable position.
Evidence that gas chambers were used for killing
Argument: Nazis did not use gas chambers to mass murder Jews. Small chambers did exist for delousing and Zyklon-B was used in this process.
A Soviet soldier posed at Majdanek holding the cover of the vents through which Zyklon B was inserted. The picture was published in the London press in October 1944.
Detail of a photograph taken at Auschwitz between February 9 and 11, 1943, showing a gas chamber at Crematorium Complex II, then under construction. The four induction columns, into which Zyklon B was inserted, are clearly visible
There have been claims by Holocaust deniers that the gas chambers built to massacre civilians never existed, and the structures identified as gas chambers actually served other purposes. However, the more common argument has been to claim that gas was not used to murder Jews and other victims, and that many gas chambers were also built after the war just for show. An often-quoted document advancing this theory is the "Leuchter Report" by Fred A. Leuchter, a paper stating that only traces of cyanide were found when he examined samples taken from one of the Auschwitz gas chambers in 1988. This paper is used to further a common debating tactic, namely the suggestion that because only traces of cyanide were found in 1988, then no cyanide was used at all in Auschwitz, over forty years earlier. However, the manager of the analytical laboratory employed by Leuchter later testified under oath that, had he known of the intent of Leuchter's sampling, he would have informed him that the cyanide would not have penetrated the brick, and that therefore Leuchter's pulverized chips of brick of random thickness would have diluted the true samples by large and random amounts; nevertheless Leuchter found these trace samples in the disputed gas chambers, in contrast to none at all in a "negative control" sample. Furthermore, despite the difficulty of finding traces of this material 50 years later, in February of 1990, Professor Jan Markiewicz, Director of the Institute of Forensic Research in Kraków, redid the analysis.[2] Markiewicz and his team used microdiffusion techniques to test for cyanide in samples from the suspected gas chambers, from delousing chambers, and from control areas elsewhere within Auschwitz. The control samples tested negative, while cyanide residue was found in both the delousing chambers and the gas chambers. The amount of cyanide found had a great variability (possibly due to 50 years of exposure to the elements to varying degrees[3]), but even so, the categorical results were that cyanide was found where expected, and not in the control samples.
The cyanide used in Auschwitz and other extermination camps was created through activation of the pesticide Zyklon B, which was used to exterminate prisoners by the thousands. Further investigation into the death camps revealed that the most difficult part of the operation was the disposal of thousands of corpses after the executions had taken place; this required the construction of huge ovens to cremate the corpses.
Another claim made by Holocaust deniers is that there were no vents in the gas chambers through which Zyklon B could be inserted, in the words of Leuchter, "No holes - no Holocaust." The BBC offers a response showing that this requires disregard of much documentation:
Deniers have said for years that physical evidence is lacking because they have seen no holes in the roof of the Birkenau gas chamber where the Zyklon was poured in. (In some of the gas chambers the Zyklon B was poured in through the roof, while in others it was thrown in through the windows.) The roof was dynamited at war's end, and today lies broken in pieces, but three of the four original holes were positively identified in a recent paper. Their location in the concrete matches with eyewitness testimony, aerial photos from 1944, and a ground photo from 1943. The physical evidence shows unmistakably that the Zyklon holes were cast into the concrete when the building was constructed.[4]
Another piece of evidence Holocaust deniers frequently question is what happened to the ash after the bodies were cremated (see, for example the IHR's list of questions about the Holocaust). The amount of ash produced in the cremation of a person is about a shoebox full, if done in a proper crematorium. However, eyewitness testomonies documented by Hilberg's The Destruction of the European Jews describe the burning process used in Treblinka, Sobibor, and Belzec to have carried out in multiple open-air grills where stacks of bodies were burned on top of metal bars. These grills were operated by burning piles of wood underneath. It has been questioned by holocaust deniers (e.g. in the One Third Of The Holocaust documentary) if it would have been possible to burn hundreds of thousands of corpses using the method as documented by Hilberg, especialy when the low efficency of such burning process, the high amounts of wood required and the often windy weather conditions of the camps are taken into account.
Aerial photographs of Auschwitz indicate that some ash produced in Auschwitz was piled into the nearby river and marsh, and there is well-documented evidence that other ash was used as fertilizer in nearby fields. Photographs of Treblinka taken by the camp commandant show ash piles being distributed by steam shovels.Photos of Kurt Franz
A number of other common Holocaust denial claims about gas chambers rely on misdirection, similar to the Auschwitz plaque example given above. For example, the Institute for Historical Review has claimed that Holocaust testimony on gas chambers is unreliable, because, in the words of the IHR: "Hoss said in his confession that his men would smoke cigarettes as they pulled the dead Jews out of the gas chambers ten minutes after gassing. Isn't Zyklon-B explosive? Highly so. The Hoss confession is obviously false." This claim is clearly false, as the Nizkor Project and other sources has pointed out, the minimal concentration of Zyklon-B to be explosive is 56,000 parts per million, while the amount used to kill a human is 300 parts per million, as is evidenced in any common reference guide to chemicals, such as the "The Merck Index" and the "CRC Handbook of Chemistry and Physics". In fact, the Nazis' own documentation stated "Danger of explosion: 75 grams of HCN in 1 cubic meter of air. Normal application approx. 8-10 grams per cubic meter, therefore not explosive." (Nuremberg document NI-9912)
Another example is the claim that "at Birkenau (part of Auschwitz), on the site of the so-called gas chamber and incinerator, there is not nearly enough rubble to represent the remains of a building that size." Historians point out that after liberation the local Polish farming population returned, and, needing materials to rebuild houses before winter, removed large amounts of re-usable bricks from the ruins. There is by the crematorium site a big pile of waste that the salvagers threw aside as they searched for usable bricks.
The Institute for Historical Review publicly offered a reward of $50,000 for verifiable "proof that gas chambers for the purpose of killing human beings existed at or in Auschwitz." Mel Mermelstein, a survivor of Auschwitz, submitted his own testimony as proof but it was ignored. He then sued IHR and won the $50,000 reward, plus $40,000 in damages for personal suffering as well as having the court declare the occurrence of the Holocaust a legally indisputable fact.
External Link: Gassing as a "remedy" for Jews
External Link: A detailed refutation of the Leuchter-Report
Six million figure
The figure "six million" (which refers only to Jewish victims, and is larger when counting the other ethnic, religious, and minority groups targeted for extinction) is often downgraded by claims to a figure of only one million deaths, or only three hundred thousand "casualties." Numerous documents archived and discovered after the war gave meticulous accounts of the exterminations that took place at the "death camps" (such as Auschwitz and Treblinka). Deniers claim that these documents are based on Soviet propaganda, primarily from Ilya Ehrenburg's Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, and are therefore unreliable.
Complicating the matter is that various instances have been reported where the death tolls of particular death camps were claimed to be overstated. Any possible ambiguity in death toll figures has been seized upon by deniers as evidence for their position. Deniers make the mistake of trying to show that debate on the exact number of deaths is somehow evidence that no one died at all. Nevertheless, the evidence for the large death figures quoted by mainstream sources is overwhelming.
A much-quoted instance of disputing the toll is the "Breitbard Document" (actually a paper by Aaron Breitbart), [5] which describes a commemorative plaque at Auschwitz to the victims that died there, which read, Four million people suffered and died here at the hands of the Nazi murderers between the years 1940 and 1945. In 1990, a new plaque replaced the old one. It now says, May this place where the Nazis assassinated 1,500,000 men, women and children, a majority of them Jews from diverse European countries, be forever for mankind a cry of despair and of warning. The lower numbers are due to the fact that the Soviets "purposely overstated the number of non-Jewish casualties at Auschwitz-Birkenau," according to the Simon Wiesenthal Center. Holocaust deniers seize on this discrepancy and insist that the number of Jews killed must be immediately brought down at least 2.5 million. If their presumption that historians had used this statistic to reach their overall estimate was correct they would be partly right, however, they ignore the facts that
the 4 million figure of the Soviets included almost 2 million non-Jews, and
historians in any event did not use the 4 million figure in calculating the total number of Jews killed.
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Jewish population
Deniers consider one of their stronger arguments to be the population of Jews before and after the Holocaust. They claim that the 1940 World Almanac gives the world Jewish population as 15,319,359, while the 1949 World Almanac gives the world Jewish population as 15,713,638. In their view this makes it impossible that 6 million Jews died, even given an extremely high birth rate. They therefore claim that either the figures are wrong, or the Holocaust, meaning the deliberate extermination of millions of Jews, cannot have happened.
However, as is typically the case, the evidence given by Holocaust deniers does not stand up to closer scrutiny. In fact, the 1949 World Almanac gives the world Jewish population as 11,266,600. Moreover, it revises its estimate of the world Jewish population in 1939 upwards, to 16,643,120. Thus, according to the 1949 World Almanac the difference between the pre and post war populations is over 5.4 million.
In addition, rather than using more accurate census figures and other records, Holocaust deniers rely on a popular compendium whose methodology of assessment is unknown, and whose estimates have varied significantly. For example, the 1982 World Almanac gives the world Jewish population as 14,318,000, while the 1990 World Almanac gives the world Jewish population as 18,169,000, and the 1996 World Almanac gives the world Jewish population as 13,451,000. Either 3.7 million Jews appeared unnoticed between 1982 and 1990, and then 4.5 million Jews disappeared equally unnoticed between 1990 and 1996, or the World Almanac is not a particularly reliable source for accurate estimates of worldwide Jewish population.
Finally, Holocaust deniers can be very selective when citing sources; other sources give very different figures for the Jewish population before and after the war. For example, the 1932 American Jewish yearbook estimate the total number of Jews in the world at 15,192,218, of whom 9,418,248 resided in Europe. However, the 1947 yearbook states: "Estimates of the world Jewish population have been assembled by the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (except for the United States and Canada) and are probably the most authentic available at the present time. The figures reveal that the total Jewish population of the world has decreased by one-third from about 16,600,000 in 1939 to about 11,000,000 in 1946 as the result of the annihilation by the Nazis of more than five and a half million European Jews. In Europe only an estimated 3,642,000 remain of the total Jewish pre-war population of approximately 9,740,000."
This selectivity means that Holocaust deniers often ignore the documents produced by the Nazis themselves, who used figures of between 9 and 11 million for the Jewish population of Europe, as evidenced in the notes of the Wannsee Conference. In fact, the Nazis methodically recorded the ongoing reduction of the Jewish population, as in the Korherr Report, which gave the status of the Final Solution through December, 1942:
The total number of Jews in the world in 1937 is generally estimated at around 17 million, thereof more than 10 million in Europe... From 1937 to the beginning of 1943 the number of Jews, partially due to the excess mortality of the Jews in Central and Western Europe, partially due to the evacuations especially in the more strongly populated Eastern Territories which are here counted as off-going, should have diminished by an estimated 4 million. It must not be overlooked in this respect that of the deaths of Soviet Russian Jews in the occupied Eastern territories only a part was recorded, whereas deaths in the rest of European Russia and at the front are not included at all.... On the whole European Jewry should since 1933, i.e. in the first decade of National Socialist German power, have lost almost half of its population.
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Nazi documentation
The Höfle Telegram.
The Nazis themselves documented many of their crimes. For example, the Höfle Telegram sent by SS-Sturmbannführer Hermann Höfle on January 11, 1943 to SS-Obersturmbannführer Adolf Eichmann in Berlin listed 1,274,166 Jews killed in the four camps of Aktion Reinhard during 1942 alone, while the Korherr Report compiled by an SS statistician, gave a conservative total of 2,454,000 Jews deported to extermination camps or killed by the Einsatzgruppen. The complete status reports of the Einsatzgruppen death squads were found in the archives of the Gestapo when it was searched by the U.S. Army, and the accuracy attested to by the former Einsatzgruppen members who testified during war crime trials and at other times. These reports alone list an additional 1,500,000 or so murders during mass shootings, the vast majority of these victims were Jews. Further, surviving Nazi documentation spells out their plans to murder the Jews of Europe (see the Wannsee Conference), recorded the trains arriving at various death camps, and included photographs and films of many atrocities.
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Testimonies
The most telling evidence is the testimony of thousands of survivors of the Holocaust, as well as the testimony of captured Nazi officers at the Nuremberg Trials and other times. Holocaust deniers discount these testimonies claiming that these witnesses were tortured, or that Rudolf Hoess allegedly signed a "blood stained confession" written in a language he did not understand (English) or that the Nuremberg Trial did not follow proper judicial procedures. This argument again ignores publicly available material, including the fact that Hoess's testimony did not consist of merely a signed confession; he also wrote two volumes of memoirs before being brought to trial and gave extensive testimony outside of the Nuremberg proceedings. Further, his testimony agrees with that of other contemporary written accounts by Auschwitz officials, such as Pery Broad, an SS man stationed at Auschwitz while Hoess was the commandant and the diary kept by SS physician at Auschwitz Johann Kremer, as well as the testimony of hundreds of camp guards and victims.[6] The result is that Holocaust deniers have needed to construct an elaborate conspiracy theory involving a massive "Jewish plan" to plant forged documents across the continent of Europe, aided by the torture and forced confession of every captured Nazi officer, soldier, and worker who testified at the war crimes tribunal.
Sonderkommandos provide another key piece of testimony. There were Jewish prisoners who helped march Jews to the gas chambers, and later dragged the bodies to the crematoria. Since they witnessed the entire process, their testimony is vital in confirming that the gas chambers were used for murderous purposes and the scale to which they were used. [7]
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References
Deborah Lipstadt, Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory, Plume (The Penguin Group), 1994.
Richard J. Evans, Lying About Hitler: History, Holocaust, and the David Irving Trial, Basic Books, 2002 (ISBN 0-465-02153-0).
Raul Hilberg. The Destruction of the European Jews (Yale Univ. Press, 2003, c1961).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Holocaust_denialThe estimated number of Jewish fatalities during the Holocaust is usually given as between 5.1 and 6 million victims. However, despite the availability of numerous scholarly works and archival sources on the subject, Holocaust-related figures might never be definitively known. Furthermore, it is important to keep in mind that the available Holocaust statistics include a wide margin of error because:
Not all victims of the Holocaust were registered.
Countless records that did exist were destroyed by the Nazis, or lost, burned, or damaged in military actions.
Records often contain fragmentary information, failing to include, for example, the victim's ethnic, national, or religious affiliation.
In addition, one should critically examine any statistics presented because:
Different scholars have used different base dates for computing their figures, a situation that results in statistical differences due to the changing national borders of the Holocaust period.
Figures for victims of a given country usually include not only citizens but also resident aliens and stateless refugees.
Scholars have sometimes wrongly equated data about the arrests of various victims with fatalities, particularly in the case of non-Jewish victims.
What follows are two different estimates of Jewish deaths by country and the sources from which those statistics are drawn. Please note that these are just a sampling of the published Holocaust-related statistics. Additional sources for estimates of Jewish deaths are provided following these two examples:
Country Number
Poland up to 3,000,000
USSR over 700,000
Romania 270,000
Czechoslovakia 260,000
Hungary over 180,000
Germany 130,000
Lithuania up to 130,000
Netherlands over 100,000
France 75,000
Latvia 70,000
Yugoslavia 60,000
Greece 60,000
Austria over 50,000
Belgium 24,000
Italy (including Rhodes) 9,000
Estonia over 1,000
Norway under 1,000
Luxembourg under 1,000
Danzig under 1,000
Total 5,100,000
Source: Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, 3rd ed. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003), Vol. 3, p. 1321.
Country Minimum Loss Maximum Loss
Austria 50,000 50,000
Belgium 28,900 28,900
Bohemia and Moravia 78,150 78,150
Bulgaria 0 0
Denmark 60 60
Estonia 1,500 2,000
Finland 7 7
France 77,320 77,320
Germany 134,500 141,500
Greece 60,000 67,000
Hungary 550,000 569,000
Italy 7,680 7,680
Latvia 70,000 71,500
Lithuania 140,000 143,000
Luxembourg 1,950 1,950
Netherlands 100,000 100,000
Norway 762 762
Poland 2,900,000 3,000,000
Romania 271,000 287,000
Slovakia 68,000 71,000
Soviet Union 1,000,000 1,100,000
Yugoslavia 56,200 63,300
Source: Yehuda Bauer, and Robert Rozett, "Estimated Jewish Losses in the Holocaust," in Encyclopedia of the Holocaust (New York: Macmillan, 1990), p.1799. See this source for a full explanation of these statistics.
For additional Holocaust statistics, see:
Benz, Wolfgang, editor. Dimension des Volkermords: Die Zahl der judischen Opfer des Nationalsozialismus. Munich: Oldenbourg, 1991.
Fleming, Gerald. Hitler and the Final Solution. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984.
Lestchinsky, Jacob. Crisis, Catastrophe, and Survival: A Jewish Balance Sheet, 1941-1948. New York: Institute of Jewish Affairs of the World Jewish Congress, 1948.
Levin, Nora. The Holocaust: The Destruction of European Jewry, 1933-1945. New York: Schocken, 1973
Reitlinger, Gerald. The Final Solution, the Attempt to Exterminate the Jews of Europe, 1939-1945. Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson, 1987
False Prophets, Fake Skeptics: Holocaust denial in our time
Hajime Tokuno, MD
4/1/1996
The political basis for Holocaust Denial
How does a responsible citizen in a free society respond to the man who comes forth to state: "The earth is a flat entity, not spherical, as has been so often proclaimed throughout history." And furthermore he says to you, "Without the benefit of technical data (because I myself do not believe in the utility of such things), prove to me decisively that the world is not flat." You might at first think that he was being ignorant or delusional or irrational. On the other hand, you might also suppose that he knows the truth of the matter but prefers to state otherwise. He perhaps despises the prestige or elitism of modern science and wishes therefore to insult and defy its defenders with outrageous remarks.
Those who deny that there ever was a Nazi genocide of Jews during World War II have used a similar style of arguing. Deniers have subjugated science, in this case historical science, to a political agenda, creating a pseudoscience called Holocaust Denial. Whether they are cognizant con artists, or true believers duped by their own illogic, they distort facts to a desired end in the guise of skepticism. This two part article will examine first the political goals of Holocaust deniers, and then in a subsequent issue will delve into the various strategies of deception.
The Holocaust deniers come from the most extreme fringes of the political spectrum; they are (for now) mainly far right or far left wing demagogues: radical anarchists, so-called "libertarians", extreme "conservatives" and most of all dedicated fascists and neo-Nazis. Not all of them, however, have kept their distance from the mainstream in American politics. David Duke, the former Imperial Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, the founder of the NAAWP [National Association for the Advancement of White People], a self-proclaimed disciple of Adolf Hitler, garnered nearly 40% of the popular vote in Louisiana during his bid to become a United States Senator in the late 1980's. Patrick Buchanan, though not overtly a Holocaust denier, has in his earlier days as a right-wing columnist, cast doubts on certain specifics about the history of the Holocaust and questioned the validity of survivor stories in general. Talk show hosts have regularly invited and interviewed Holocaust deniers and have given them somewhat excessive exposure on daytime television. Invariably, they have subjected tens of thousands of American TV viewers to vulgar and abusive campaigns of hate and bigotry.
Deniers of the Holocaust have used every method in the vast repertoire of modern media to generate and disseminate their obscene propaganda, from "scholarly" journals to comic-books, video tapes and Internet homepages. They call themselves "Revisionists" - a title with an air of professionalism which they suppose will someday bring them a measure of respect. They pretend that they have a very pure desire to introduce alternative interpretations to help clarify certain "vague" aspects of history, but scholarship is certainly not one of their objectives. In fact, they do not contemplate legitimate historical ambiguities; they endeavor to obfuscate them. At worst they are sociopathic con-artists and creators of devious lies; at best, they are fanatics blinded by extremist beliefs.
What have deniers of the Holocaust, whose movements have grown large and spread worldwide, asserted over the last 50 years? The following list outlines the most commonly shared formulas among the abovementioned parties (particularly Nazis) in the United States and Western Europe:
- that six million Jews were never killed, they were merely repatriated to Poland and Russia and, after the war, to America.
- that the "genocide of the Jews" is a Zionist myth designed to gain the world's sympathy and ultimately to generate profits for Judaic causes.
- that among those Jews who died in WWII, most perished from "natural causes" and "Allied bombs."
- that gas chambers were never applied to the murder of human beings (and particularly Jews) in WWII.
- that Hitler, the Nazis and the Third Reich did not instigate the Second World War. The Allies (influenced by the "Zionists") brought war to the Germans first. Specifically, elements within the International Jewish Conspiracy - not Hitler - prompted the governments of Allied nations to declare war on the German people.
Here we see the basic core of a cruel mythology. They have inverted the accepted truths; they have constructed an imaginary universe in which Jews were the criminals and Germans were the victims. The role of perpetrator and persecuted have been reversed or obscured.
They think that the "uninformed" public, gullible or ignorant, will believe anything which is told to them - any lie, any misinformation - as long as it is presented with enough vim and vigor. They would have us believe that all Jewish accounts and diaries such as Anne Frank's and Primo Levi's are "lies" or delusions because Jews simply are incapable of telling the truth. They wish for us to relearn history as we know it: that all non-Jewish accounts (including those by German, French, Russian, and Polish prisoners) are "Allied forgeries." They have tried time and again to instill confusion in the academic world by denouncing or denying the existence of any material evidence, any written document and any living witness. They have repeatedly ignored those speeches before and during the War (by Hitler, Goebbels, Himmler and others) that demanded the total physical extermination of the Jewish race and (when confronted with actual Nazi documents) they have called such proclamations "hyperboles." They have dismissed the confessions of former Nazi officers and bureaucrats as inauthentic ("extracted" via torture and coersion inside American and Soviet prisons).
But Hitler's and Himmler's tirades are not subtle insinuations subject to liberal interpretation. They specifically demand the total elimination of all Jews - not just from Germany, not just from the Third Reich, but from the face of the Earth. In October 1944, Himmler officially tells his SS office in Auschwitz to end the systematic killing of Jews by gas. Then in November 1944, he orders the complete dismantling of all crematoria. Why would he have halted an operation that had never existed ?
Deniers bypass many extraordinary details recorded in the most easily obtainable Nazi chronicles. These include the meticulously compiled materials detailing the murder frenzies early in the war: the experimental gassing of the tens of thousands of mentally ill patients and Soviet prisoners, the mass killing of tens of thousands of Jews at Babi Yar and other sites throughout Eastern Europe by the Einsatzgruppen, the mass starvation of Jews in the ghettoes of Warsaw and Lvov.
But not all assertions by deniers are so blatant. A handful of "revisionists" have been less bold. Among those who have been less ostentatious and obnoxious are "scholars" who employ a certain sophisticated lingo reminiscent of historians and sociologists. They have inserted segments from interviews with alleged "survivors" and paraphrased sections from "unpublished" materials. They have mentioned libraries and memorials where their "yet undiscovered evidence" remains hidden to the world. They have tried to appeal to our sense of scientific and enlightened thinking. Here is an example. A revisionist states survivor so-and-so recalls 4 million Jews were murdered in Auschwitz while recent historians' calculate a number closer to 1.2 million. He goes on to conclude that because of this one mistake, everything else in that individual's essay must likewise be erroneous. Anyone who has done any kind of work in the field of journalism or history knows that mistakes are made in every type of interview and diary because so much of our memory is degraded by forgetfulness, guesswork, misunderstanding and hearsay. But we know from the overwhelming body of knowledge that comes from the thousands of Holocaust survivor accounts and the tens of thousands of pages of Nazi records, that the overall picture of Auschwitz and Babi Yar and Kristallnacht are factual - despite the small errors.
Some deniers have become quite brutal and have taken to taunting survivors - asking them to prove the veracity of certain details in the Holocaust story. This has indeed been a slap to the face - adding insult to injury against those who have already suffered immeasurably. In September of 1979, members of a "revisionist" congress organized by well-known Holocaust deniers offered $50,000 to whomever could prove the existence of gas chambers in Europe and furthermore could prove that these were utilized in the murder of millions of European Jews.
Why do they do these kinds of things? Clearly, it is not simply a mental exercise nor a joke. Clearly, there is a hidden agenda. But whose? Anarchists hope in their smear campaigns to undermine the success of Jewish people everywhere - labelling them greedy capitalists. The neo-Nazis and Nazis, on the other hand, follow a more primitive and barbaric pathway: to blame and persecute the Jews for all that is wrong and imperfect in the lives of "White Aryan men." But despite these varying contexts, the common root is the same for both. It is virulent antisemitism that inspires them all - full of hate, full of anger, and full of ill-will. It is the same ancient mythology which has been levelled against the Jews throughout the history of Western civilization. And it draws its strength from harnessing the unfocussed anger and paranoia of disenfranchized individuals.
Holocaust deniers, like most cultish leaders who have devoted their lives to deceiving the public, have used every imaginable method to develop the "believeable story." Their dangerousness lies not in their capacity to offend but to convince people with their emotional energy and pseudo-logic. The role of true skeptics in our time is to identify the small minority of charlatans who call themselves historians and to uncover (in order to dispel) their most vindictive lies. It is a profound irony that despite the absurdity of these revisionist claims and despite the blatant fallacies in their "logic", they have - by virtue of mere scandalousness - opened up a "forum of debate." And although they pretend to partake in a stimulating intellectual exercise and to share in a liberal democratic system - they have done little more than waste our time forcing us to argue against their terrifying propaganda. Their belief is that perhaps some day in the near future they will have a cadre - even an army - of "true believers" who will earnestly hold fast to the notion that a Holocaust never occured. How much easier will their task be when there are no more survivors to bear witness to history?
Tactics
Deniers claim to be historians, interested in open discussion and skepticism, they practice historical pseudoscience, subverting truth to political will.
The following is a list of examples of the styles of argument employed by well-known holocaust deniers. The tactics of deception used will be familiar to anyone who has listened to the speech of a cult leader, read the hyperbole of tabloid news, or purchased a used car.
1. Name-calling: First and foremost it is important to recognize that all Holocaust revisionist theory exists within a framework of antisemitism. Therefore, one must be wary to the bitter jargon used by men like Professor Paul Rassinier in Paris who call such respected Holocaust historians like Raul Hilberg "collaborators" taking part in a world conspiracy designed to promote the "Holocaust myth." One must also be particularly attentive to the unsavory vocabulary that is often levelled against Holocaust historians who pursue honest research: titles such as "exterminationist" and "Holocaust promoter" (as if to say that Jewish historians love to think about the Shoah).
2. Applying moral relativism: A common cliche among Holocaust revisionists is the notion that the Americans and the Allies were just as guilty in their "crimes against humanity" as were the Nazis. A post-War "historian" Harry Elmer Barnes began such a debate some forty years ago. He gives the following example of anti-German "atrocities:" the expulsion (but not the annihilation) of the Sudetenland Germans from Czechoslovakia (an act of Allied retaliation which he calls the "Final Solution" for the German people
in mockery of Heydrich's and Himmler's "Final Solution to the Jewish Question"). Others from Barnes' school have discussed the firebombings over Dresden and Koln and conveyed that such actions constituted a greater war crime than any killings in Nazi camps. In saying so, they have attempted to dilute and dissipate the historical significance and unique quality of the Jewish genocide.
3. Misquoting sources (intentionally): Rassinier only pretends (in one of his most crucial essays) to be quoting a passage from a well-known authority. He states that the famous historian-sociologist Professor Hannah Arendt wrote that three million Polish Jews were murdered in the "first day of war." In reality, she never said such a thing. Arendt's original assessment is that the German campaign to annihilate three million Polish Jews BEGAN on the first day of World War II. By creating such distortions, Rassinier tries to cast doubt on the credibility of Arendt as well as all Jewish scholars who discuss the Holocaust. Rassinier then states (in the same paragraph) that Professor Hilberg, another famous Jewish historian, claimed "two million Polish Jews were transported to their deaths." (Actually the original Hilberg quote includes a qualifier "... were transported by train in 1942 and 1943 to their deaths.") Rassinier then conveniently juxtaposes these two segments -Hilberg's "two million" and Arendt's "three million" - in order to prove that even two famous and "reliable" Jews disagree significantly on even the most rudimentary facts.
4. Eliminating the facts: Rassinier frequently ignores the most basic and profound pieces of evidence. For example, he dismisses certain key statements by Hitler as mere "hyperbole." Der Fuhrer made two very public speeches in the Reichstag (in 1939 and then again in 1942) stating his wish to annihilate the "Jewish race in Europe" in the event of war. It seems Adolf Hitler would have been quite disappointed if he knew that future fascists and antisemites would deny him his proudest accomplishment - making Europe free of Jews.
5. Changing the facts by subtracting the details: We know for a fact that Jews who disappeared during the war were generally killed by Nazis and other fascists inside concentration camps and in Einsatzgruppen raids in Poland, Ukraine and Russia. We also know that all of these places were regions that came under Soviet jurisdiction after the war. Austin App, one of the earliest Holocaust deniers, inverts key component in this sequence of events. He states that Jews who disappeared during the war did so within the boundaries of Soviet-occupied territories. His implication is that the Communists, not the Nazis, were responsible for all Jewish deaths.
Some have said that gas chambers were made only after the end of the war - contrived somehow by Poles and others to justify the war against Germany. One little-known fact (which the deniers maximally exploit) is that a few gas chambers were re-built after the war based on original schematics and broken remnants left behind by German engineers. But these were re-built (NOT built for the first time) for local museums because so many of the originals were destroyed by the Nazis as they fled from the Soviet attack. Nevertheless, the German records include the original blueprints for the various types of gas chambers - including those designed specifically for mass murder.
Finally, the British neo-fascist Harwood takes a 1943 / 1944 report from the ICRC (International Committee of the Red Cross) and intentionally leaves out certain crucial facts. He extracts and highlights a section in the original manuscript on how certain pockets of European Jews roamed about freely. He is no doubt referring to the Jews of Denmark who nearly all survived the War and also the Jews of Hungary and Italy who lived in relative safety until the second half of 1944. But these Jews survived not because the Nazis had wished it so. They survived because their respective governments resisted Hitler's anti-Jewish policies. In Denmark, the king and his supporters -saved the Danish Jewish community by agreeing to distribute yellow stars to everyone (Jews and Gentiles alike) so that no distinction could be made by the German invaders.
In Hungary, President Horthy denied the Nazi's request to surrender the Hungarian Jews until August of 1944. Likewise, in Italy, ilDuce Mussolini did not comply to Hitler's commands concerning the treatment of Italian Jews. But these Jews were unusual among all the European Jews in that they were briefly spared the wrath of Hitler's killing machines. Yet Harwood makes a bizarre leap; he concludes that if the Nazis had allowed just a few Jews to "roam freely about" then they certainly had not planned on annihilating any of them. What he has deleted in his essay is a key section in the ICRC report which states the following: that most other Jews - the majority (those of Germany, Austria, Poland, Russia, Czechoslovakia etc.etc.) were mistreated, deported, starved and murdered in concentration camps.
6. Applying the "Conspiracy Theory" [on why Germany "needed" to persecute Jews]: Austin App notes the following coincidence and trumps up its historical significance. He concludes that only two leaders (both coincidentally Jews) ultimately determined the fate of Europe: the United States Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau and the Soviet Antifascist Committee Chairman Ilya Ehrenburg. What he fails to include is this: that greater than ninety-five percent of the leadership in the US and USSR was Gentile, and these two world leaders - Ehrenburg and Morgenthau - had infinitesimally minor roles to play within the broader circle of policymakers. But App insinuates that a few influential Jews planned the Second World War and that Germans had no other choice than to fight the US and USSR in order to overthrow those nebulous "International Jewish Conspirators."
App claims also that the Jewish Chairman of Palestine, Chaim Weizmann, called for the allegiance of European Jews to Western democracies and extrapolates from this new myth that any military "response" on the part of Hitler to this "provocation" was a matter of German national security. He implies that Weizmann forced Hitler's hand and that ultimately all Jews deserved what they got. App must have known that Chairman Weizmann had no army, no government and no nation with which to launch a viable frontal assault against the might of the Third Reich. A so-called alliance of Jews and Britons could never have materialized.
7. Playing the numbers game: App frequently dabbles in what one might call a "numbers game." Perhaps he thinks that the mere mention of numbers (even erroneous ones) might render his arguments more cogent or more scientific. He uses distortions of published figures or he changes the numbers themselves to suit his arguments. For example, he states that there were 700,000 Jews in Germany before the war and 500,000 after the war. He implies that the German Jewish communities were still largely intact even after the so-called genocide. What he fails to mention, however, is that most among the 500,000 were non-German who travelled to and stayed in the former Reich in order to find the remnants of their families. These 500,000 were so-called DPs - or displaced persons - who stayed only temporarily in Germany only for as long as it took to locate surviving relatives. They were French, Dutch, Italian, Polish and Russian refugees - returning from the liberated camps and ghettos. Most of the original 700,000 German Jews had escaped, emigrated or died before and during the war.
App then goes on to "quote" the Associated Press in their assessment of the total refugee situation in postwar Germany and Europe. The original AP article states that 3,000,000 displaced persons were seeking a new home. App tampers with this information and instead declares that 3,000,000 JEWS were seeking a new home. He tries to deceive the public by implying that all refugees were Jews - that none (or very few) had died. Finally, in his essay called "The Six Million Swindle," App claims that the government of Israel demanded 20 billion dollars in indemnities for the resettlement of the European Exodus. In reality, Israel requested 735 million dollars.
Paul Rassinier, on the other hand, invents the following fantasy: Because Hitler could not have killed three million Jews (his "calculated" number of missing Jews after the War - a gross underestimation even by Nazi standards), and because three million Jews could not have simply disappeared from the face of the earth, they necessarily must have emigrated. But where? He comes up with an incredibly unlikely scenario (which is far more unbelievable than even the most improbable facts). He states that more than two million had been evacuated by the Soviet Communists to Central Asia and from there half of them (or approximately one million Jews) travelled by land to China and by sea across the Pacific Ocean to the North American continent. Revisionists rely on the likelihood that any falsification of history will pass unnoticed because it will not be verified or corrected by the majority of people; the latter (he presumes) do not care passionately enough about issues pertaining to the Holocaust to make such corrections.
8. Generating incredulity [or appealing to "logic"]: App and most other Holocaust revisionists harp on the unlikeliness that mass killings could EVER occur anywhere. They ask us the same question that we ask ourselves: what would have , prompted all those many intelligent men to divert the vast technology and resource of a respected industrialized society (incidentally with a long history of music and poetry) to accomplish such a feat of horror? Who knows? But that is exactly why the Nazi war crimes - even half a century after Hitler's death - present themselves as inexplicable and heinous in all the eyes of humanity.
9. Instilling doubt: Holocaust deniers love to point out witnesses' accounts which contradict one another. If, however, all available information from all personal accounts were nearly identical, that indeed would be hard to believe - given the degree of government censorship and personal stress which each survivor endured during six years of war. Human memory, even in normal circumstances, is poor at retaining minute details or specific numbers, but it has been quite adequate in preserving the Gestalt.
10. Feigning stupidity: A professor at Northwestern University, Arthur Butz has been one of the most outspoken Holocaust deniers in the academic arena. Because of his image as a respected scholar at a respected institution, he seemed at first less malignant than the others in his realm. Nevertheless, his claims are often just as egregiously deceptive as any. His chief complaint is that the Nazi war criminals tried in Nuremburg (Frank, Goering, Ribbentrop) often misunderstood the questions posed to them by the War Crimes Tribunal. They therefore answered incorrectly to many simple queries such as "was there mass murder?" or "were there mounds of corpses?" Butz goes on to say that these men on the stand were, in effect, tricked by "Jewish propagandists."
11. Creating publicity: All demagogues love nothing more than publicity. With publicity - and notoriety - comes a certain degree of legitimacy. In a 1984 court case, the government of Canada accused the German emigre, Ernst Zundel, with producing and distributing antisemitic propaganda. He used the court trial as a platform from which he launched his neo-Nazi diatribes and antisemitic agenda. He hired an "engineer" by the name of Fred Leuchter, an eccentric man with a long history of business fraud and questionable credential (no background in toxicology, no degree in chemistry, no degree in physics or engineering), to become an expert witness who would decisively debunk the "legend" of the Nazi gas chambers. In the end, the judge dismissed or barred Leuchter's "evidence." Nevertheless, the Holocaust deniers in the end claimed one tiny victory. They had gained some free publicity by way of news coverage in the trial. Even Leuchter, despite the widespread accusations that he was a charlatan and an amateur in the field of execution-related technology, continued to be interviewed on that very topic by several agencies. The first of his stories appeared in the Atlantic Monthly (February 1990). Another on Prime Time Live (May 1990). Another in the New York Times (October 1990).
12. Inventing and promoting pseudoscience [the art of using "expert witnesses"]: Leuchter claims that the gas chamber was not really used against human beings. He concludes this after a brief vacation to Auschwitzand and several trips to a local library. He states that the design of the "gas chamber" was compatible only with a disinfecting facility.
Error #1: Leuchter estimates that a certain crematorium at Auschwitz could process only 156 bodies. He was apparently unaware of an SS report which confirms that the same building (which he describes) destroyed 4756 bodies in the course of a single 24 hour period.
Error #2: He notes that the cyanide residue from one gas chamber wall is less than the residue from a wall inside a known delousing chamber. Leuchter claims that this is the most conclusive evidence that a "gas chamber" could not have been used for killing humans. His argument is based on the assumption that humans require much more cyanide than lice to die - an assumption that, as it happens, is wrong. In fact, lice require about a 50 times higher dose of cyanide gas than humans in order to die.
Error #3: One gas chamber contains no cyanide residues. Leuchter postulates from this observation that the building in question (which in every other way resembles the typical "gas chambers" at Auschwitz) had never been used for gas and casts doubt on whether any such building could have been used for gas. Again, he is unfamiliar with the record. The particular crematorium which he studied is different from all the others. The Nazis had destroyed its ceilings and walls with powerful explosives before escaping Auschwitz. As a result of the attempted demolition, the remaining walls have been exposed for more than 40 years to wind, rain and flooding. As a result of this exposure, the cyanide traces naturally have been nearly obliterated.
13. Entering campus life: A Holocaust denier by the name of Bradley Smith entered the fray in the early 1990s as a one-man "campus crusader." Although he frequently voiced such notions as "open debate" and other noble pursuits, he was merely mocking and debasing true academic learning. He advertised his messages on behalf of an organization called CODOH [Committee on the Open Debate on the Holocaust] in school newspapers and magazines. (More recently, he has monopolized several Internet sites under the same pretext and format.)
In his writings appear the usual ramblings of Holocaust-deniers. Examples included the following: that pictures of concentration camps were fake, that the war trials were illegal, that the gas chambers never existed, etc. etc. On most campuses, starting with the University of Michigan (and then at Duke and Cornell), huge controversies erupted over the publication of Bradley's ads. At Michigan, the newspaper's president argued that his decision to publish the material was to avoid setting a precedent in censorship. This, despite the fact that the same newspaper regularly excluded cigarette ads and pornographic materials (because of their indecency) and despite the fact that the editing staff regularly rejected and excluded badly written or poorly researched articles. Even more surprisingly, the university administration, the local newspaper and even the New York Times defended Bradley's 1st Amendment Right to free expression. The Harvard Crimson on the other hand turned away Bradley's ad calling it "utter bullshit..." and an attempt "to propagate hatred against Jews."
14. Recruiting "neutral" parties: Professor Noam Chomsky, considered to be one of the founding fathers of modern linguistics, has also earned himself a sizable reputation as a left-wing radical and a "self-hating Jew." He has, at countless rallies, launched vicious verbal attacks against the state of Israel and the US on matters relating to Palestinian rights. He has, on various occasions, supported the position of the PLO even when that organization was still deeply entrenched in terror tactics as a primary modus operandi. His essays, which mercilessly condemn Israelis and Jews for crimes against Palestinians, have become the centerpieces of his career - rarely objective even when they have been scholarly - often verging on spiteful venom and hysteria. Although he himself is free of the taint of Holocaust denial, numerous Nazi and Communist journals (especially in France) have published his works because he has been an avid defender of "free speech," especially in the realm of antisemitic and revisionist literature. He has placed numerous articles in neo-Nazi publications including the Journal of Historical Review.
Neo-Nazi polemicists describe Chomsky as objective, scientific and neutral. Clearly, Chomsky's Jewish ancestry has not rendered him "neutral." In fact, his position is distinctly anti-Jewish. By virtue of his birthright and his high standing as a world-famous researcher, he has merely granted some legitimacy to neo-Nazis such as Robert Faurisson (France's best-known neo-fascist). Briefly, Faurisson's thesis is this: that all Jews are unrepentant liars and therefore all "survivor" accounts are fake. Yet Chomsky calls Faurisson "a liberal" who shows not a "hint of antisemitism" and thereby endorses his books and articles.
Conclusion
Far from the skeptical, fair-minded academicians they pretend to be, Holocaust deniers are political activists, pushing an agenda of hate. They employ the tactics of hoaxers and frauds in an attempt to rewrite history to suit their ideological needs. Perhaps their only redeeming value is that they serve as an extreme and therefore obvious example which illuminates the subtler and more politically acceptable forms of antiscientific historical revisionism increasingly infiltrating the academic arena.
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