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How will the Holocaust Deniers try to lie this one away?

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ck4829 Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sun May-13-07 10:22 PM
Original message
How will the Holocaust Deniers try to lie this one away?
"As the Third Reich headed to defeat in World War II, the Germans burned millions of records to cover up history's worst genocide. But the fraction that survived was enough to make up the largest Nazi archive in existence.

This week, efforts to lift the 52-year-old blanket of secrecy from this historical treasure are likely to take a big step forward.

The 11-nation commission governing the International Tracing Service, an arm of the International Committee of the Red Cross, meets in Amsterdam Monday and Tuesday to decide when and how to make electronic copies of its files available to researchers."

An internal communication from Heinrich Himmler to his toadies:

"No prisoner must be allowed to fall into the hands of the enemy alive."

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070513/ap_on_re_eu/nazi_archive
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hobbit709 Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sun May-13-07 10:24 PM
Response to Original message
1. If you don't believe
no amount of evidence will make you accept it. There are closed minds and then there are minds that have nailed and riveted shut.
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jobycom Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sun May-13-07 10:44 PM
Response to Original message
2. I've seen two brands of Holocaust deniers.
There are the ones who claim that the number of deaths were exagerated, or that the bodies were the results of disease and poor living conditions or an inability to dispose of the corpses, or some such stuff. They are easily disproven, and in fact rarely have any real idea of evidence.

Then there are the ones who claim that the Jewish Holocaust was a myth, because although millions of Jews died horrible deaths in concentration camps, Jews weren't targetted just because they were Jewish. Rather, they were locked up as a "danger to the state," along with millions of others captured in Hitler's wars, and were just unfortunately part of the mass program of prisoner elimination.

The second group has stronger arguments, though they are still wrong. But their motivation is interesting. They are usually trying to deny the need for a state like Israel, or further trying to make the leaders of Israel seem cold and manipulative, creating a myth of modern Jewish persecution to justify their occupation of Palestine.

Either group is weakened the more documentation is released.

As for how the Deniers will deny this, it's simple. Look at how much time "THEY" (meaning those vague forces in charge of everything) have had to forge documents, pick and choose only evidence that would support their cause, destroy the 90% of documents that would have weakened their cause (and blame it on Hitler), and brainwash the world into believing only one possible story. It's the same tactic that Oswald deniers use, or the 9-11 conspiracy folk use. You can't trust anything that supports the official opinion because it has been fabricated, and you can only trust vague, shady, glimpsed once then destroyed, misrepresented or outright manufactured evidence that their side produces as true.
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lolly Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sun May-13-07 11:00 PM
Response to Reply #2
3. "Victims of Secular Humanism"
I guess this fits under your 2nd group--Christians who claim that it wasn't Jews who were singled out, it was all religious people. Nazis were secular humanists who hated "people of faith," so Jews were killed not because they were Jewish, but because they believed in a G-d.

I've had students from Christian schools tell me this quite earnestly. Elie Wiesel's Night is apparently a favorite of Christian schools in many areas, and this is the main lesson they get from it.

:shrug:
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Behind the Aegis Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Mon May-14-07 01:22 AM
Response to Reply #2
4. A very interesting analysis.
There is a third group. They use aspects of the two groups you describe. It is this group, IMO, that is the most scary. They also go to great lengths to minimize the Holocaust and its impact of the Jewish people, in particular, and therefore, escape the label of "Denier."
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ComerPerro Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Mon May-14-07 01:26 AM
Response to Reply #2
5. funny thing about that first group: disease, living conditions, inability to dispose corpses,
whatever, who cares. We are still talking about mass murder.

Not sure how they rationalize that one. "Oh, well, they didn't kill them on purpose." Liek that's any better.
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Blashyrkh Donating Member (816 posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Mon May-14-07 01:46 AM
Response to Reply #5
6. Legal technicality called manslaughter.
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jobycom Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Mon May-14-07 11:10 AM
Response to Reply #5
7. They blame the Allies.
I'm not an expert on the Holocaust or anything involving it, I just researched this once to try to figure out what the deniers were claiming. So anyone who disagrees with specific points should probably be believed over me.

Deniers usually blame the Allies for the deaths. Since we destroyed Germany's ability to feed and care for the prisoners, it's our fault. Some argue that we took too long getting to the camps, so people died after we basically annihilated the Nazis but before we got to the camps to care for the prisoners. They also claim the Allies greatly exaggerated the numbers of dead, labeling anyone who was missing at the end of the war as a victim of the Holocaust. All of this was to justify our bombings of civilian targets and the massive slaughter of troops and civilians in Germany.

Kind of like the American Civil War--if all of those people were slaughtered just to prevent the Confederacy from seceding, many would claim it was not worth it. If the war was to free the slaves, then the cost was worth it. So northerners claim the war was about slavery, and southerners claim it was about secession and state's rights. We have the same battle over Iraq, and how much of a monster they can make Hussein, to justify Bush's invasion.

We claim that Hitler invaded France without provocation and in violation of treaty, but a Hitler defender would claim that the Allies had violated the treaty first, and Hitler was pre-emptively attacking an enemy he thought was going to attack him. So that same Hitler defender would argue that the Allies were not as morally superior as they claim in the start of the war, and that both sides were trying to destroy the other. Thus, at the end, the Allies had to justify the millions dead and make Hitler the clear bad guy. So, they had piles of bodies at these camps from the neglect at the end of the war--clearly thousands upon thousands. From those, they created a myth of millions upon millions deliberately murdered, rather than dying as a tragic consequence to a war the Allies had been willing participants in. At the same time, the Jews wanted Israel, so the myth was extended to make the Jews the victims of a persecution so extreme that their conquest of Palestine was justified.

That's not the way I would describe what happened, I'm putting it in a Denier's perspective. Similar to those who try to argue that someone other than Oswald killed JFK, they ignore clear evidence, and look for discrepancies or other interpretations of the evidence, or they look for ways to raise doubts about the official story. Keep in mind that we aren't talking about one event on film somewhere, but we are trying to analyze a series of events that happened over ten years, in many countries, under many different commanders, most of whom had varying orders and varying perspectives. If you were a Lieutenant ordered to kill a hundred prisoners in a town that had shown resistance, you don't necessarily know that that there are a hundred others ordered to do the same that day across all of Poland, and that all the victims are of the same religion. A later historian might have that information in the form of eye-witness accounts, and maybe local news reports. Since the Nazis destroyed so many records, though, we might not have any signed orders saying "Round up the Jews and kill them all." So it's a matter, sometimes, of interpreting what happened.

Remember, it's a war, and over a hundred million died violently. Towns and countries were destroyed. Rumors--true and false--are more common than documented evidence, and even where there is documented evidence, it isn't always clear how representative that evidence is. If a colonel somewhere ordered several lieutenants to slaughter prisoners, was that order his own, or did it come from above? If a prison camp gassed thousands, was that the result of national policy or a mass-murdering psychopathic commandant? There is a lot of room for interpretation, and that means a lot of room for distortion. The governments on both sides did some of the distorting, too. Keep in mind that one of the Allies was Joseph Stalin.

The Holocaust happened. Millions, maybe tens of millions, were murdered as part of a Nazi plan to exterminate those who did not fit the Nazi idea of racial purity. A hundred million more were slaughtered by both sides in military actions that targeted civilians and troops. Hitler did target the Jews specifically, but he did also target other groups. All of that is certain. It's just some of the interpretations that are hard to determine, and the deniers take those vagaries and spin them into denial of what Hitler did. And what he did was so horrific that some people just doubt it could be true.

Way too long, I know. And not specific on evidence. Sorry. :)
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NNN0LHI Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Mon May-14-07 11:38 AM
Response to Original message
8. Are there large numbers of Holocaust Deniers on the loose?
Edited on Mon May-14-07 11:45 AM by NNN0LHI
I don't think I have ever met one personally. Actually I am sure I never met one. I don't think I knew there were any until I got on the internet.

Don
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JustABozoOnThisBus Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Mon May-14-07 01:30 PM
Response to Reply #8
10. I don't know any deniers. I don't think they exist.
I deny the existence of deniers!!!

On the other hand, I don't think any of my friends would deny evolution, either. But there seems to be a huge percentage of people who deny that. I gotta get out more.

:rofl:

(just kidding, I believe there are deniers, but I don't know any)
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NorthernSpy Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Mon May-14-07 01:30 PM
Response to Reply #8
11. I once had a huge fight with a denier who threatened me with legal action...
:crazy:
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NNN0LHI Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Mon May-14-07 02:31 PM
Response to Reply #11
12. Threatened you with legal action?
I hope I never meet that guy.

Don
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NorthernSpy Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Mon May-14-07 01:21 PM
Response to Original message
9. won't they just say that the papers are forgeries?
That's what I bet will happen.

I also predict that an elaborate conspiracy theory will grow up around this story, probably involving allegations of large concealed donations made to the Red Cross by certain powerful and shady entities. They will point to the recent Red Cross acceptance of the the Magen David Adom as an affiliated organization as evidence for these accusations of secret influence.

Their obvious cognitive stereotypies make them awfully predictable.
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