speech of Rabbi Cohen in Teheran: Orthodox Jewish attitude to the 'Holocaust'
Rabbi Aharon Cohen of Neturei Karta | 18.12.2006 18:53 | Analysis | Anti-militarism | Anti-racism | Palestine | World
"As is well known, Zionism and the Holocaust have become very much intertwined over the years and the Zionists make a great issue of the Holocaust in order to further their illegitimate philosophy and aims."
"We put effort into attending occasions such as this because we feel that we have both a religious and religion based humanitarian duty to spread our message as much as possible."
"We put effort into attending occasions such as this because we feel that we have both a religious and religion based humanitarian duty to spread our message as much as possible."
1. Honourable friends, peers and colleagues. We are gathered here to discuss and consider from many angles a tremendously prominent issue from among the tragic events of the 2nd World War. The issue which has become known as the 'Holocaust'. As is known this issue revolves around the policy and actions adopted by Nazi Germany against the Jewish People. This is of course in the context of their much wider murderous activities at that time. My aim is to try and give you the Orthodox Jewish approach to this matter.
2. Firstly let me express my gratitude to the illustrious organisers of this valuable event for granting my colleagues and myself the opportunity to express our views on this matter and we consider this opportunity a very great privilege.
3. I and my colleagues are what is known as Orthodox Jews, that is Jews who endeavour to live their lives entirely according to the age old Jewish religion and way of life known as Judaism. We are here under the banner of the group known as Neturei Karta which is not a separate movement or organisation but propagators of the philosophy expressing the opposition by Orthodox Jewry to the idea known as Zionism – the secular nationalistic movement to form a sectarian State in Palestine. As is well known, Zionism and the Holocaust have become very much intertwined over the years and the Zionists make a great issue of the Holocaust in order to further their illegitimate philosophy and aims. I wish to talk briefly about both of these topics and their connection.
4. We put effort into attending occasions such as this because we feel that we have both a religious and religion based humanitarian duty to spread our message as much as possible. Consequently I pray that our discussions and conclusions at this conference will be correct and true in every aspect.
5. I would like firstly to recap briefly for everyone present, because of its relevance to the subject of the Holocaust, the fact that Judaism and Zionism are totally different and diametrically opposed concepts. Judaism is an age old G-dly way of life going back thousands of years full of moral, ethical and religious content. Zionism is a comparatively new – little over one hundred years – secular nationalistic concept completely devoid of ethics and morals. Although, it must be said that sadly there are religious groups among the Jewish People who have been affected and infected by the Zionist nationalistic philosophy and have 'bolted' Zionism onto Judaism, incorrectly and falsely against the teachings of Judaism as handed down through the generations.
6. Judaism teaches that although the Jewish People were promised the Holy Land, now known as Palestine, this was only subject to certain conditions, basically that we had to maintain the highest of moral, ethical and religious standards. Our religious teachings and literature – our Torah – are replete with warnings that if these conditions were not fulfilled then the Jewish People would be dispersed in a divinely decreed exile.
7. This is what took place. The conditions were not fulfilled to the required degree and the Jewish People were dispersed to the four corners of the globe, as history confirms. Right up to the present day the Jewish People are in a divinely decreed exile in which we are required to be loyal citizens of the countries in which we find ourselves and we are prohibited under oath from trying to force our way out of the exile by the efforts of our own hands. We are also prohibited under oath from trying to form a State of our own in Palestine. To contravene these prohibitions would constitute a rebellion against the wishes of the A-lmighty and we are warned of dire consequences of making any such attempt.
8. The philosophy of the secular movement of Zionism totally ignores and transgresses the clear Jewish teachings outlined and because of this, Zionism was condemned right from its inception by the great Jewish Religious authorities.
9. Furthermore, Zionism right from its inception completely ignored the fact that there was an indigenous population in Palestine comprising mostly Palestinians, and the Zionists have followed a policy of depriving the Palestinians of their hope for self determination on the land they had occupied for centuries. Depriving the Palestinians of their homes, livelihoods and lives. So committing a shocking contravention of religion based humanitarian justice.
10. Judaism however, preaches compassion and consideration for the property and certainly the lives of every fellow man.
11. It will of course be clear from the above firstly that the Zionists do not represent the Jewish People as a whole, and furthermore that anti-Zionism is to be applauded and not to be confused with the ancient bigotry of anti-Semitism. Something which we know is very well appreciated here in the Islamic Republic of Iran where the Jewish community lives peacefully with full civil rights and has done so for thousands of years.
12. Now one of the pillars of justification for Zionism is the event of the Holocaust, with the Zionists claiming that the Jews must have a State of their own in order to prevent (as they claim) the events of the Holocaust ever being repeated. 'Never Again' is their slogan. So I would like to set out the Orthodox Jewish view on the Holocaust.
13. Firstly, the facts. There is no doubt what so ever, that during World War 2 there developed a terrible and catastrophic policy and action of genocide perpetrated by Nazi Germany against the Jewish People, confirmed by innumerable eye witness survivors and fully documented again and again. I personally was spared the worst effects of the War because I was living in England which thankfully was not occupied by Nazi Germany. However, I and many many others lost countless friends and relatives who perished under the Nazi rule by intentional murder and genocide. Three million Jews in Poland, more than half a million in Hungary, many tens or hundreds of thousands in Russia, Slovakia, France, Belgium, Holland and more. The figure of six million is regularly quoted. One may wish to dispute this actual figure, but the crime was just as dreadful whether the millions (and there were millions) of victims numbered six million, five million or four million. The method of murder is also irrelevant, whether it was by gas chamber (and there were eye witnesses to this), firing squads or whatever. The evil was the same. It would be a terrible affront to the memory of those who perished to belittle the guilt of the crime in any way.
14. However, the Orthodox Jewish teaching and attitude is that the perpetrators of a crime, although fully guilty and responsible for their actions, would never have succeeded in their evil unless the A-lmighty wished it. So, to that extent the victim or victims have of course to attempt to avoid the evil, but if this proves impossible, then they have to accept the will of the A-lmighty. Our teaching is that part of the decree of exile divinely imposed upon us, is that it is not the task of the Jewish People to bring our persecutors to justice. That is the task of the A-lmighty. Our task is to accept the will of the A-lmighty and to strive to improve ourselves, removing from our behaviour the deeds that may have been the cause of our suffering. That has been the Jewish attitude during all the long history of Jewish suffering.
15. In no way can we have the audacity to, as it were, try to prevent the will of the A-lmighty and assume that we are capable of preventing such a thing from happening again. That would be heresy.
16. The Zionists, with their secular pompous approach behave in complete opposition to this philosophy and dare to say 'Never Again'. They have the audacity to think that they can prevent the A-lmighty from repeating a 'Holocaust'. This is heresy.
17. Furthermore, as we all know, they compound the wrong of this policy by imposing themselves in a most cruel and harsh manner on the Palestinian People.
18. I must add that the use by the Zionists of the Holocaust to further their aim of a sectarian State is the height of hypocrisy when one bears in mind that the Zionists turned each stage of Nazi oppression to their own advantage, to further the aim of forming a State. In the thirties when the Nazi policy was to expel the Jews from Germany, it is well documented how the Zionists cooperated by working together – yes together - with the Nazi authorities to evacuate 'suitable' Jews i.e. young healthy pioneer material, from Germany to Palestine. Then during the war when the killing was proceeding, it is again well documented how their attitude was one of callousness, not helping when they could even though they were able to. They needed the suffering and the deaths in order to be able to push for their State when the war would end. Finally, after the war they turned the whole issue of the Holocaust and the pity and sympathy it evoked into almost an article of faith in order to ensure as much as possible the acquisition of their State. Claiming that Zionism was there in order to prevent another Holocaust, when in fact Zionism predated the Holocaust by decades. They then proceeded to justify their atrocities against the Palestinians in order to further their cause.
19. To sum up, the Orthodox Jewish view is that yes there was a Holocaust to a terribly significant degree whatever that was. But in no way can it be used to justify the illegitimate and criminal cause and actions of Zionism.
20. My friends I wish to end with the prayer that the underlying cause of strife and bloodshed in the Middle East, namely, the State known as 'Israel', be totally and peacefully dissolved. To be replaced by a regime fully in accordance with the aspirations of the Palestinians. When Arab and Jew will be able to live peacefully together as they did for centuries.
21. May we then merit the time when the glory of the A-lmighty will be revealed to all and all mankind will be at peace with each other.
2. Firstly let me express my gratitude to the illustrious organisers of this valuable event for granting my colleagues and myself the opportunity to express our views on this matter and we consider this opportunity a very great privilege.
3. I and my colleagues are what is known as Orthodox Jews, that is Jews who endeavour to live their lives entirely according to the age old Jewish religion and way of life known as Judaism. We are here under the banner of the group known as Neturei Karta which is not a separate movement or organisation but propagators of the philosophy expressing the opposition by Orthodox Jewry to the idea known as Zionism – the secular nationalistic movement to form a sectarian State in Palestine. As is well known, Zionism and the Holocaust have become very much intertwined over the years and the Zionists make a great issue of the Holocaust in order to further their illegitimate philosophy and aims. I wish to talk briefly about both of these topics and their connection.
4. We put effort into attending occasions such as this because we feel that we have both a religious and religion based humanitarian duty to spread our message as much as possible. Consequently I pray that our discussions and conclusions at this conference will be correct and true in every aspect.
5. I would like firstly to recap briefly for everyone present, because of its relevance to the subject of the Holocaust, the fact that Judaism and Zionism are totally different and diametrically opposed concepts. Judaism is an age old G-dly way of life going back thousands of years full of moral, ethical and religious content. Zionism is a comparatively new – little over one hundred years – secular nationalistic concept completely devoid of ethics and morals. Although, it must be said that sadly there are religious groups among the Jewish People who have been affected and infected by the Zionist nationalistic philosophy and have 'bolted' Zionism onto Judaism, incorrectly and falsely against the teachings of Judaism as handed down through the generations.
6. Judaism teaches that although the Jewish People were promised the Holy Land, now known as Palestine, this was only subject to certain conditions, basically that we had to maintain the highest of moral, ethical and religious standards. Our religious teachings and literature – our Torah – are replete with warnings that if these conditions were not fulfilled then the Jewish People would be dispersed in a divinely decreed exile.
7. This is what took place. The conditions were not fulfilled to the required degree and the Jewish People were dispersed to the four corners of the globe, as history confirms. Right up to the present day the Jewish People are in a divinely decreed exile in which we are required to be loyal citizens of the countries in which we find ourselves and we are prohibited under oath from trying to force our way out of the exile by the efforts of our own hands. We are also prohibited under oath from trying to form a State of our own in Palestine. To contravene these prohibitions would constitute a rebellion against the wishes of the A-lmighty and we are warned of dire consequences of making any such attempt.
8. The philosophy of the secular movement of Zionism totally ignores and transgresses the clear Jewish teachings outlined and because of this, Zionism was condemned right from its inception by the great Jewish Religious authorities.
9. Furthermore, Zionism right from its inception completely ignored the fact that there was an indigenous population in Palestine comprising mostly Palestinians, and the Zionists have followed a policy of depriving the Palestinians of their hope for self determination on the land they had occupied for centuries. Depriving the Palestinians of their homes, livelihoods and lives. So committing a shocking contravention of religion based humanitarian justice.
10. Judaism however, preaches compassion and consideration for the property and certainly the lives of every fellow man.
11. It will of course be clear from the above firstly that the Zionists do not represent the Jewish People as a whole, and furthermore that anti-Zionism is to be applauded and not to be confused with the ancient bigotry of anti-Semitism. Something which we know is very well appreciated here in the Islamic Republic of Iran where the Jewish community lives peacefully with full civil rights and has done so for thousands of years.
12. Now one of the pillars of justification for Zionism is the event of the Holocaust, with the Zionists claiming that the Jews must have a State of their own in order to prevent (as they claim) the events of the Holocaust ever being repeated. 'Never Again' is their slogan. So I would like to set out the Orthodox Jewish view on the Holocaust.
13. Firstly, the facts. There is no doubt what so ever, that during World War 2 there developed a terrible and catastrophic policy and action of genocide perpetrated by Nazi Germany against the Jewish People, confirmed by innumerable eye witness survivors and fully documented again and again. I personally was spared the worst effects of the War because I was living in England which thankfully was not occupied by Nazi Germany. However, I and many many others lost countless friends and relatives who perished under the Nazi rule by intentional murder and genocide. Three million Jews in Poland, more than half a million in Hungary, many tens or hundreds of thousands in Russia, Slovakia, France, Belgium, Holland and more. The figure of six million is regularly quoted. One may wish to dispute this actual figure, but the crime was just as dreadful whether the millions (and there were millions) of victims numbered six million, five million or four million. The method of murder is also irrelevant, whether it was by gas chamber (and there were eye witnesses to this), firing squads or whatever. The evil was the same. It would be a terrible affront to the memory of those who perished to belittle the guilt of the crime in any way.
14. However, the Orthodox Jewish teaching and attitude is that the perpetrators of a crime, although fully guilty and responsible for their actions, would never have succeeded in their evil unless the A-lmighty wished it. So, to that extent the victim or victims have of course to attempt to avoid the evil, but if this proves impossible, then they have to accept the will of the A-lmighty. Our teaching is that part of the decree of exile divinely imposed upon us, is that it is not the task of the Jewish People to bring our persecutors to justice. That is the task of the A-lmighty. Our task is to accept the will of the A-lmighty and to strive to improve ourselves, removing from our behaviour the deeds that may have been the cause of our suffering. That has been the Jewish attitude during all the long history of Jewish suffering.
15. In no way can we have the audacity to, as it were, try to prevent the will of the A-lmighty and assume that we are capable of preventing such a thing from happening again. That would be heresy.
16. The Zionists, with their secular pompous approach behave in complete opposition to this philosophy and dare to say 'Never Again'. They have the audacity to think that they can prevent the A-lmighty from repeating a 'Holocaust'. This is heresy.
17. Furthermore, as we all know, they compound the wrong of this policy by imposing themselves in a most cruel and harsh manner on the Palestinian People.
18. I must add that the use by the Zionists of the Holocaust to further their aim of a sectarian State is the height of hypocrisy when one bears in mind that the Zionists turned each stage of Nazi oppression to their own advantage, to further the aim of forming a State. In the thirties when the Nazi policy was to expel the Jews from Germany, it is well documented how the Zionists cooperated by working together – yes together - with the Nazi authorities to evacuate 'suitable' Jews i.e. young healthy pioneer material, from Germany to Palestine. Then during the war when the killing was proceeding, it is again well documented how their attitude was one of callousness, not helping when they could even though they were able to. They needed the suffering and the deaths in order to be able to push for their State when the war would end. Finally, after the war they turned the whole issue of the Holocaust and the pity and sympathy it evoked into almost an article of faith in order to ensure as much as possible the acquisition of their State. Claiming that Zionism was there in order to prevent another Holocaust, when in fact Zionism predated the Holocaust by decades. They then proceeded to justify their atrocities against the Palestinians in order to further their cause.
19. To sum up, the Orthodox Jewish view is that yes there was a Holocaust to a terribly significant degree whatever that was. But in no way can it be used to justify the illegitimate and criminal cause and actions of Zionism.
20. My friends I wish to end with the prayer that the underlying cause of strife and bloodshed in the Middle East, namely, the State known as 'Israel', be totally and peacefully dissolved. To be replaced by a regime fully in accordance with the aspirations of the Palestinians. When Arab and Jew will be able to live peacefully together as they did for centuries.
21. May we then merit the time when the glory of the A-lmighty will be revealed to all and all mankind will be at peace with each other.
Rabbi Aharon Cohen of Neturei Karta
Homepage:
http://www.nkusa.org/activities/Speeches/2006Iran-ACohen.cfm
Comments
Hide the following 57 comments
Rubbish
18.12.2006 20:29
2. Nuturei Karta represents a tiny proportion of the Orthodox community
3. Aaron Cohen has been condemned by all other factions of the orthadox community from the Lubavitch (pro Israel majority) to minor anti Zionist factions who are abhorred that he attended a revisionist Holocaust denial conference
4. The supporters of this affront to the darkest period of history was also attended by David Duke, former head of the ku Klux klan - and ardent anti zionist, whose arguments are strangely adopted by the extreme left (but then go far enough left and you bang into the right)
Jewish & Proud
unacceptable promise?
19.12.2006 00:02
"To sum up, the Orthodox Jewish view is that yes there was a Holocaust to a terribly significant degree whatever that was. But in no way can it be used to justify the illegitimate and criminal cause and actions of Zionism."
Jewish Zionist writing "Claiming that Zionism is not a part with Judaism is clear stupidity and lack of Jewish pride and knowledge." is perhaps a little bigotted. One can have knowledge, and some Jews have de-Jewed themselves when they learned the original clear title to Israel in ancient times was established through genocide. (I know that happened by 1947)
Hitler did far more than Herzen to bring the State of Israel into existence. Have you read up what that Jewish girl from one of the Baltic states said when asked to speak in favour of the Balfour Declaration - she asked to read it, and then decided she could not support it. Her concern was for the present inhabitants, and that there simply was not enough room in Israel for all the Jews in the world..
If there were two post Hitler mistakes made by Jews, one was the creation of a Jewish State, and to set out to recover the population they had before the Holocaust. There is great value in rarity. few value the common.
The dangerous bit is "Proud, Strong, and incresing in nimbers" when God is busily inventing new diseases to reduce the human population to what the Earth can support, - Are Religious Jews on the side of Satan?.
.
Ilyan
My sloppy writing
19.12.2006 00:58
Ilyan
I've always wondered
19.12.2006 01:00
Somebody told me that that busuness went on to become Estee Lauder which being boycotted by the world's Arab and Muslim community now due to Ron Lauder's (Estee Lauders' latest zionist President) vocal support for Israel.
It would be ironic if true because one of Estee Lauders' main competitors is L’Oreal who's founder was Nazi sympathizer Eugene Schueller and the companies current CEO is a member of LePens extreme right neo nasi party in France.
Soap dodger
Cause You're Worth It
19.12.2006 01:06
Kill nazi scum, die die die
... back breifly ...
19.12.2006 08:36
Find this soap, these lampshades ... do modern scientific tests on them ... prove the varacity of these vile claims.
Ask yourself why an important european rabbi can attend and question the holocaust story and yet english christians languish in jail for stating an opinion?
Because it is a hoax and those perpetuating it hate you. They call you goyim - which means cattle. They want to own you, buy you and sell you as it says in their special book.
I can call christ names, insult the prophet mo, deny the deaths of Palestinian innocents till the cows come home ... but question the logic, the evidence of late war germany using significant portions of its dwindling fuel stocks to burn compleatly - leaving NO TRACE - the bodies of millions ... and ...
... well, just observe the treatment [some] would have me bare in this thread:
jackslucid
e-mail:
jackslucid@hotmail.com
Jack, you've outed yourself!
19.12.2006 09:23
"Find this soap, these lampshades" you say. Well, seeing as we're talking about over 60 years ago, how is this to be done? Surely relying on the testimony of the PERPETRATORS is enough for you, hmmm?
"Ask yourself why an important european rabbi can attend and question the holocaust story and yet english christians languish in jail for stating an opinion? " This "important" "rabbi" was allowed to attend because despite his being Jewish he is not actually a practicing Jew judging by his actions and ideas. He is an antisemite as much as the Iranian president, and for that reason only he was allowed to attend. Note that Israeli Holocaust experts and surviviors were NOT allowed to attend the conference.
"They call you goyim - which means cattle." For your information, the word goyim means "nations". So you have been accorded a lot more respect than you accord the Jews.
"They want to own you, buy you and sell you as it says in their special book." And here you have shown up your true character as a classic antisemite. Which special book are you referring to? The Torah? Show me chapter and verse where it says that. I dare you.
"the evidence of late war germany using significant portions of its dwindling fuel stocks to burn compleatly - leaving NO TRACE - the bodies of millions " So on top of everything else you are also a Holocaust denier. How not nice to meet you. There were plenty of traces! Go look at the pictures of the mounds of ashes, the mountains of dead bodies just piled up inside the concentration camps which were discovered and documented by the liberating Allied armies. Or are you going to claim now that these were forgeries perpetrated by the British Army too?
ank
SOAP & LAMPSHADES
19.12.2006 10:14
Donovon
You have just 'outed' yourself
19.12.2006 10:18
What I hate is:
Fanatical abortion doctor killing christian evangelists
Illiterate jihadist statue destroyers
Hysterical PC guardians of false history
Racist deathcult worshipping settler supremacists
... and you.
I am free of caring about the convienient personal attacks on [me] whenever I raise issues that contain an inconvienient truth about religious cults.
I don't care for your paper thin justifications for denying investigation, nor for your purile denouncements - in true stalinistic style.
I could not give shit one for your opinions of [me].
Write large, your musings are in crayon and devoid of meaning.
jackslucid
e-mail:
jackslucid@hotmail.com
Besides ...
19.12.2006 10:28
I don't want to be arrested next time I go to the european mainland, nor have the jewish defence league throw acid in my face
Actually no I am not.
I just can't be bothered to engage in a pointless non debate with those who have their incoming ports totally blocked up from truth.
Nor to correct the obvious distortions contained in your little hate filled piece (and I assume that you are lying - although I can not be certain. I suppose it is possible for one person to be mistaken about so much and to mistakenly represent falsehood as truth!).
jackslucid
e-mail:
jackslucid@hotmail.com
Holocausts are unacceptible whoever the victims are
19.12.2006 10:42
The State of Israel was founded on the ethnic cleansing of Arabs, but as the Jewish Jesus said, you reap what you sow. What goes around, comes around.....
Bad Karma
Jack, Jack, Jack, you're doing it again
19.12.2006 11:20
As for the rest of your pathetic little posts, the only reason you don' t want to engage with the likes of me is that you have no counter-argument. You state that you "don't care for your paper thin justifications for denying investigation". Please tell me, why does the Holocaust need investigation yet again? It has been investigaged and researched thoroughly and exhaustively for over 60 years with documentation provided - I repeat - by the PERPETRATORS THEMSELVES; not by Zionists, Jews, or any other bogeymen you might wish to invent. The Nazis themselves proudly and openly admitted and documented the Holocaust. This in addition to all the evidence provided by Allied Intelligence and of course the survivors themselves.
You haven't managed to disprove my assertion that you are an antisemite, and a Nazi to boot.
And I am indeed delighted and proud to be hated by you. It shows I'm doing something right. I've hit a nerve haven't I.
ank
Good grief
19.12.2006 12:01
Jack, if anyone, you are the guardian of false history - there is not a single credible historian amongst holocaust deniers, what academics there are (and there are not many) are 'experts' in irrelevant fields. Irving is a self taught amateur with a clear bias towards apologising for Hitler. He was totally discredited as a 'historian' at his trial in the UK. There is literally tonnes of evidence that proves the holocaust - you simply do not want to acknowledge it. Learn to read German and find out for yourself, instead of trotting out ill informed crap about 'PC guardians' - is academia another zionist plot then?, are all the doctoral students that have looked into aspects of the holocaust over the past 60 years or so all been duped or bought off then. How exactly did this process work in practice - how did all these thousands of enquiring minds get it so wrong - absolute shite, there are so many doctoral thesis supporting the 'orthodox view' because there is mountains of evidence supporting it. Could you provide more detail about all these 'zionist forgers' who conveniently left millions of bureuacratic documents in loads of archives all over Germany, or who cunningly penned entries in Goebbells diaries or drafted the Eichmann papers. You hang round on Liberty Forums with your overly Nazi mates if you want, but do not come here pretending there is any academic credibility to your ill informed opinions about the holocaust.
Historian
Oh ank ank ank ank ank
19.12.2006 13:15
I am not your dearie, and neither am I poor or afraid, but will admit to the straw man argument of arrest etc. As I am anonomous (but not to the concerted researcher) I have little to be afraid of. Merely an example of the pressure to conform put upon serious research.
The 'proof' you seek[sic]:
Robert Faurrison. I'll let those who are interested use their search engines to find his story and the story of others like him.
"As for the rest of your pathetic little posts, the only reason you don' t want to engage with the likes of me is that you have no counter-argument."
Oh really?
"You state that you "don't care for your paper thin justifications for denying investigation". Please tell me, why does the Holocaust need investigation yet again?"
No. You tell me why it is illegal to do such investigation in many countries. Besides, that is somewhat bizzare ... imagine asking your history teacher a similar question: why do we need to investigate the act of reformation and succession sir, didn't last years class already investigate? Pretty paper thin I would say!
"The Nazis themselves proudly and openly admitted and documented the Holocaust. This in addition to all the evidence provided by Allied Intelligence and of course the survivors themselves."
Yes, the germans were exquisit record keepers - perhaps why the law will intervene if you attempt to seek out the material or diseminate your ideas - and if it merely a case of presenting the evidence, why the hysteria when some do?
'You haven't managed to disprove my assertion that you are an antisemite, and a Nazi to boot.'
Yes, and you haven't managed to prove your vile insults either, merely using them instead of presenting evidence to justify your claim that those that question the official (and uniquely legally sanctioned) history of mass murder during the period of 'world war' are - for want of a better word - evil!.
"And I am indeed delighted and proud to be hated by you. It shows I'm doing something right. I've hit a nerve haven't I."
Well that goes a little beyond my own position of not giving a shit either way ... perhaps you might seek some kind of psychiatric treatment concerning your delight in being hated. I would suggest that it shows a distinct anti-social element to your makeup and acts as a pathological barrier to new information ... but hey, thats your business and I want none of it, I am content to lazily hate you for your stupidity and hysteria whilst not actually busting a gut over it.
Could drag this on by reference to what the word holocaust actually means, by reasserting that your translation is (knowingly?) false with regard to goyim, that WW11 killed 250million people and that all systems of religious and political intolerance were to blame.
Are you a political or religious jew?
I am neither, although by the 1967 law of return I could get the yanks to put me up in tel aviv on a pension!
There, bite into that my little hater friend.
jackslucid
e-mail:
jackslucid@hotmail.com
Jackslucid - not a racist???
19.12.2006 13:27
I did read it - I asked why the author had put Holocaust in inverted commas.
Jewish Zionist writing "Claiming that Zionism is not a part with Judaism is clear stupidity and lack of Jewish pride and knowledge." is perhaps a little bigotted. One can have knowledge, and some Jews have de-Jewed themselves when they learned the original clear title to Israel in ancient times was established through genocide. (I know that happened by 1947)
What???
"Hitler did far more than Herzen to bring the State of Israel into existence."
Really, did Hitler start the Zionist movement after the Dreyfus affair convinced him that Jews needed a country where the word 'Jew' was not a slander? What proof do you have of the rubbish you speak? Hitler was a good mate of Haj Amin Al Husseini though.
" Have you read up what that Jewish girl from one of the Baltic states said when asked to speak in favour of the Balfour Declaration - she asked to read it, and then decided she could not support it. Her concern was for the present inhabitants, and that there simply was not enough room in Israel for all the Jews in the world.."
Yes there is enough room - no I have not read it - what about the many who did sign?
"If there were two post Hitler mistakes made by Jews, one was the creation of a Jewish State, and to set out to recover the population they had before the Holocaust. There is great value in rarity. few value the common."
What a crass comment - Well of course we should not try to recover the Jewish population after Nazis made such a good effort at wiping us out - why dont we voluntarily stop breeding and just die out
"The dangerous bit is "Proud, Strong, and incresing in nimbers" when God is busily inventing new diseases to reduce the human population to what the Earth can support, - Are Religious Jews on the side of Satan?. "
Who reproduces more; Jews? Catholics? Muslims? You absolute idiot Ilyan
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"Is it true that jews were made into soap by the nazis and that those soap bars were later sold by a jewish business man in liberated Paris towards the end of the war? "
No it is not
"Somebody told me that that busuness went on to become Estee Lauder which being boycotted by the world's Arab and Muslim community now due to Ron Lauder's (Estee Lauders' latest zionist President) vocal support for Israel."
Dont believe all you are told
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"Find this soap, these lampshades ... do modern scientific tests on them ... prove the varacity of these vile claims. "
You sound like you should have been at the conference
"Ask yourself why an important european rabbi can attend and question the holocaust story and yet english christians languish in jail for stating an opinion? "
See the comment in the thread above
"Because it is a hoax and those perpetuating it hate you. They call you goyim - which means cattle. They want to own you, buy you and sell you as it says in their special book. "
As my freind said - Goyim means nations - Special Book - I presume you mean the Protocols and I presume you believe them
"but question the logic, the evidence of late war germany using significant portions of its dwindling fuel stocks to burn compleatly - leaving NO TRACE - the bodies of millions ... and ... "
I do question the logic of tertiating an entire people - perhaps you should.
At least you have admitted what you really are jackslucid; someone who sound like David Duke (former KKK head)
Jewish & Proud
good grief mr proper historian
19.12.2006 13:46
I presume you are a proper historian and will be discribed as such even by those who disagree with you who look to make a cheap point about your ... er ... qualifications!?!
If there is tonnes of evidence, what the fuck are you all worried about?
If, on the other hand, there is evidence to suggest that some made a political consideration about exagerating the extent and nature of the brutal war years on their particualr tribal group, I could understand the need to jelously guard the public assimulation of historical truth.
I make no claims about my 'academic credibility' since I am not seeking academic credibilty.
You want an all or nothing relationship with these notions, go ahead, knock yourself out. You want to ignore inconvienient truths and screetch hysterically about the varacity of eye witness statements ... thats your affair.
For myself, I want to know what actually happened ... I want to hear the arguments about how much actual fuel it takes to burn a body, what machines were used to grind the bones into powder and how this mountain of evidence has eluded peer reviewed scientific scrutiny for 60 years.
I want to hear about the links between zionists and nazies, I want to know when false witness has been uncovered. I want to know the exact methodology employed by those brutes, to exterminate millions, and would like to hear arguments that challange the other set of evidence that points towards a shake down of world opinion with regards to the emergence of the death squad that is israel.
Perhaps in the middle ages I might have been burnt at the stake for listening to the ridulous arguments of those that challanged the accepted and unchallangable notions of that age too ... or perhaps you think that a million christian enquistors were right about the flat earth?
Insult me if you must, but don't imagine your silly recieved wisdom is going to move me without investigation first.
Now, put the boot on the other foot for a while and present evidence as to why stalins purges were not jewish in nature - even though the overwhealming majority of its victims were non jewish and the perpetrators were ... or does revisionism only cut one way?
jackslucid
e-mail:
jackslucid@hotmail.com
... to conclude ...
19.12.2006 14:10
... who isn't?
I do know that I dislike the notion that to question the events of 60 years ago does not put you automatically in sympathy with any of the participants.
I truely seek to avoid offence ... but only because I am a nice sort of fellow.
The world is nice, the humans in it are fucked up to a greater or lesser degree.
It would not suprise me if everything said about the nazies were true.
Nor would it suprise me to hear that all that has been said against zionism were true.
Nor stalin.
Et al.
It would be an odd kind of universe if all were true, so some of it can't be.
Do the sherlock thing yourselves sweeties ... eliminate the impossible etc.
Pass through the discriminating filters of all religious types are self decieving decievers, all politicians are knowing deciers etc etc.
What you are left with is a picture of history that says as much as it could about human nature.
Lets be nice to each other and cooperate here ... unless that is you have a particular axe to grind, a particual religious obligation to fullfill and thus protect or just want to be obnoxious, unpleasent and rude ...
... there are plenty of myths to put to bed, more than enough to go round.
Wanna play?
jackslucid
e-mail:
jackslucid@hotmail.com
A reply
19.12.2006 14:53
I do not have the time to address each of your issues in turn, suffice to say, you seek to portray yourself as someone open to asking questions, yet appear remarkably closed to examining the full range of material that is available on the holocaust, instead parroting this tired old crap about things being 'forbidden'. Utter toss, mate, holocaust archives are freely open to people who take the time to find out for themselves. There is plenty of material which refutes your so called 'facts' about the lack of evidence on the holocaust. You could start here, for example:
Historian
Ignore the Revisionists
19.12.2006 15:14
The death camps, piles of shoes and clothing, testimony of survivors, admissions of the perpertrators as nations and as individuals, all stand as testiment to the hell suffered by Jews, gypsies, homosexuals and those who dared to speak out.
the memory of those who died will go on and Jackslucid, David Irving, David Duke, Ahmedinejad and those like them will never suceed in wiping it out.
Jackslucid, based on your final comment, your ancestors must be turning in their graves.
Jewish & Proud
August 29 at the opening of the Zionist Congress of 1897
19.12.2006 17:52
Dr. Mandelstam
"Wir sind ein Volk!"
19.12.2006 18:07
Theodor Herzl not Adolph Hitler
Quite astonishing lies
19.12.2006 18:37
Whoever is the cowardly anonymous who "quoted" Dr Mandelstam, all you have done is slandered, libeled and blasphemed one of the founding fathers of Zionism. Here is a direct quote of Dr. Mandelstam's words from the transcript of the first Zionist Congress.
------------------------------------------------
"The Jewish population in Russia totals more than five million, and Russia is the home of more than half of all Jews. Our fellow Jews there are subjected to numerous legal restrictions. Only the members of a very small Jewish sect, the Karaites, enjoy the same rights as the Christian subjects of the tsars. The other Jews are prohibited from living in a
large portion of the country. Only certain categories of Jews have the freedom to take up
permanent residence: merchants of the first guild, holders of academic degrees, etc.
But to belong to the first guild of merchants one must be rich, and only a few Russian Jews
are rich, and not many Jews in Russia can obtain academic degrees either,
since the secondary and higher schools admit Jewish students in very limited numbers…
This prohibits the Jews from engaging in many professions that all the Christian Russians are free to engage in…Anyone who has an opportunity to emigrate does so, in order to seek abroad the air and the light that are withheld in the fatherland.
From this site: www.morim.org/GetFile.aspx?id=1564
I thank Dr. Max Nordau, who so ably expressed, with emotion and great depth of meaning,
the sufferings of the Jewish people in the two millennia of their life in the Diaspora. I think
I will comply with the wish of my numerous compatriots and of all the participants in the Congress to express our profound gratitude to those who selflessly took part in the conferences and preliminary deliberations… And I think I am speaking for the entire Congress when I ask the President to persist in his work, without being deterred by fatigue even at the disagreeable moments that have already occurred and that still await him. Further, I ask that he continue with the same spirit and selflessness until the final success is achieved. Long live the President of the First Zionist Congress, Dr. Theodor Herzl!
From this site: www.morim.org/GetFile.aspx?id=2230
-------------------------------------------
How any of this in any way resembles anything you "quoted" Dr. Mandelstam is simply beyond my imagination.
ank
Everyones a comedian now.
19.12.2006 20:35
WTF are you then - make yourself known in the fullness of your identity then brave one.
In the mean time, I shall get on with my remote controlled plane company and continue to cook the pentagons books to the tune of 1 trillion missing US$
And I don't see how quoting one thing this early zionist said precludes quoting other things this early zionist said, I mean, just because you love this prototype zionist, doesn't mean that we have to does it?
But anyone who thinks these early zionists are super heroes doesn't actually care what damage their nasty little opinions do - unless it is to a member of their special tribe that is.
At least now we know how to view your pronouncements, with a pinch of non kosher salt.
Are you sure you are not jackslucid playing both sides for a laugh?
Dov Zakheim
I'm not going to let you get away with this
19.12.2006 20:36
You can keep inventing quotes, you can continue to put spurious remarks in the mouths of long-dead Zionists and Jewish leaders, but you cannot fool me or anyone with the slightest knowledge of history, and you cannot make them fact. Herzl never said anything faintly resembling the remark you claim he said, and libelling him on a pitiful site like this just shows you up for your ignorance and racism.
Just to set the matter straight (though why I am bothering is a bit of a mystery to me) Herzl would never have mentioned Soviet Russia because he died before such an entity ever came into being, in 1904. He would not have thought of the West liberating the East because such a political event had not even been considered back then.
For an overview of Herzl's life, see:
For selected quotes (true ones for a change) see here:
ank
Basel Zionist Congress in 1898
19.12.2006 20:54
Dr Mandelstam
On Theodor Herzl's JUDENSTAAT
19.12.2006 21:07
Sorry for the confusion, but I've been dead sometime.
Chaim Weizmann
“The Holocaust”
19.12.2006 22:20
“the hell suffered by Jews, gypsies, homosexuals and those who dared to speak out--/--the memory of those who died will go on” - Jewish & Proud
..yes indeed, but don’t forget the other “undesirables”; alcoholics, the physically and mentally handicapped, and the mentally ill..!?!...
"As Hitler's party made its bids for power, Rüdin became an enthusiastic exponent of eugenic and racial hygiene policies. His high reputation lent respectability to the Nazi policies of enforced eugenic sterilisation. Under his aegis schizophrenia and manic depression were judged categories suitable for sterilisation...The 'medical' and 'scientific' basis for the notion of eliminating the mentally ill was thus laid in the years following World War 1, preparing Germany for the propaganda that would lament the cost of maintaining the 'ballast' of the mentally ill and those with congenital diseases." - "Hitler's Scientists (Science, War and the Devil's Pact)" - John Cornwell, Penguin Books, London 2004. ISBN 0-140-29686-7
"lebensunwertes Leben"
What???
19.12.2006 23:09
Following Herzl might have eventually produced a Jewish State in centuries. The real boost started when Hitler had the leading Jewish Aides in the Nazi Party killed on the Night of the Long Knives. A trigger to make the Jewish Workers Circle tear down the submissive posters of the Board of Deputies of British Jews and call for the resistance that culminated in Cable Street to take the wind out of Mosely.
Then Hitler went on to kill some Jews in Concentration Camps, and millions in Extermination Centers, there were survivors, and they turned into the shock troops determined that there be a State of Israel at all costs.
Now we have Palestinians determined that there be a State of Palestine at all costs in the same place.
And both sides are Semites. Their difference is Religious. It is a pity that Jewish and Proud makes such ridiculous extensions of what I say. If we could have sent all the Religious people straight to Heaven sixty years ago, Earth Life might not now be facing mass Extinction. We might even have fulfilled the Divine Plan and created Heaven on Earth.
Instead all those Catholics, Jews, Moslems, and Protestants, etc.,are destroying this Creation. They are so stupid that they cannot see that the wrath of God will cancel the Life Hereafter.
Ilyan
“The Jews have a right to the land we have been living in for over 3000 years”
20.12.2006 02:07
Jews have a right to live on the same land they have been living in for over 3000 years (provided the land has not illegally obtained under international law), but not at the cruel expense of the indigenous Palestinian people who have lived on the same land for far longer than the Jews.
The way Israel has treated the Palestinians is despicable. Pretending that Israel is innocent of any provocation from a Palestinians resistance is nonsense. The conflict will continue, as planned, until Israel negotiates with the Palestinians over its boarders and pays the Palestinians compensation for loss of land that Israel keeps as part of the negotiations.
Although just why Bush would want Israel to make friends with its Arab neighbors at a time when he is including many of them in the so called ‘axis of evil’ is beyond me. Israel is a strategic military position in Bush’s so called war on terror. It appear Bush is allowing Israel to dig itself into a hole. Unless Israel intends to publicly exterminate the Palestinians there will always be a resistance. Likewise, unless Israel negotiates with the Palestinian there will always be a resistance.
No Justice, No Peace
A link.
20.12.2006 11:15
Historian
Pot insults kettle ...
20.12.2006 11:43
... right back at yer, you pompous blow hard.
... and I suppose the same qualifications as those you claim you have, placed in the resume' of those that differ in their opinions to you, would see them reduced to 'non credible' ''experts' in irrelevant fields' 'self taught amateurs with a clear bias towards apologising for Hitler' ...
Have it both ways why not!
Fake.
jackslucid
e-mail:
jackslucid@hotmail.com
Double standards
20.12.2006 11:52
No Justice - No Peace "The conflict will continue, as planned, until Israel negotiates with the Palestinians over its boarders and pays the Palestinians compensation for loss of land that Israel keeps as part of the negotiations."
Should the Jewish people who have been forced from their homes in Yemen, Iraq, Iran, Egypt and across the Arab world - surely that is unjust - perhaps we should start terrorist attacks against Yemenite civilians, and you will of course support us?
Jewish & Proud
Jewish & Proud ...
20.12.2006 12:45
Now ask yourself the same question.
jackslucid
e-mail:
jackslucid@hotmail.com
Hot Topic
20.12.2006 13:45
Perhaps if Israel sought reconciliation with it's alleged enemies as oppossed to their annihilation, they would garner more sympathy and support.
Free Speech
Jacky boy
20.12.2006 13:46
To the idiot JSL:
"Walsaw is now Gaza." - you have no idea
"The Polish Jews are now the Palestinians. " when did the Palestinians find that they wer marched out into forests and shot in their hundreds of thousnads and gassed in their millions - what a disgusting and crass comparison
"Into the sea with them" - I see you are quoting Haj Amin al Husseini, Grand Mufti of Jerusalem and a good friend of Hitler when he called for teh Jews to be pushed intto the sea.
jsl - Whereas it is legitimate to disagree with Israeli policies and actions, it is grossly illegitimate and malicious to compare them to the most evil and massive crime in modern history in order to heighten the disagreement
I don't hear pro-Palestinians referring to Egypt's Nasser as a Nazi for allowing inhuman conditions to flourish in Gaza's disgraceful, ghetto like refugee camps. Nor recently? Millions of dollars have been pumped into the Palestinian Authority coffers over the past 15 years from EU funds that include British taxpayers' money
Anyone who allows a Jew or an Israeli to be compared to Hitler and the Nazis is guilty of gross misinterpretation at best, and at worst of being a Jew hater of the worst kind.
Jewish & Proud
well for one thing
20.12.2006 14:03
Historian
Insults
20.12.2006 14:29
The fact is, I disagree with numerous historians about things all the time - but your holocaust denying mates are not scholars at all, they are not really interested in open debate, you point out the numerous other materials which they clearly ignore in their Hitler apologising rants, and they just ignore it or change the subject or denounce the person as a 'zionist'/lying jew propagandist etc? Is this reasoned debate then? Indeed, most of the time revisionists do not care whether there was a holocaust or not, they just feel the need to play it down for PR purposes. I
There is a significant difference between a 'revisionist' historian who chooses to argue one historiographical interpretation over another by clearly making available all his sources, and someone like Irving who deliberately distorts, misquotes and ignores material in order to argue a specific case. However you want to dress it up, the latter approach is disengenuous and as far from open enquiry as possibly could be imagined.
Historian
comment on comment
20.12.2006 15:02
Although you not be Aaron Cohen's biggest fan I think it would be a mistake to excommunicate or expunge him further. Surely you can see the worth in having someone who decries Israel but is still prepared to intelligently and robustly defend the veracity of the holocaust in amongst so many deniers ? Also, I heard there was a second ultra-orthodox Jewish group who oppose the state of Israel on religious grounds called Satmara - is this true and how do they differ from Neturei Karta ?
To the anti-zionists:
If the reason you condemn the state of Israel is really because it violently occupies arab lands then a little more condemnation of the US and UK governments that do exactly the same thing would balance things out.
To the holocaust deniers:
Forget any other evidence, read Aaron Cohen's testimony again. Why would such a vocal and strident critic of Israel not deny the holocaust if it wasn't true ? If you want to know why this revisionism is so offensive I'd agree with this :
13... It would be a terrible affront to the memory of those who perished to belittle the guilt of the crime in any way.
dan
baths, babies and the throwing of water ...
20.12.2006 19:53
This avoids the central issue neatly, namely that the numbers have been exagerated, the methods invented and that the results allowed for the colonisation of a land already inhabited by a people with a distinct cultural and political heritage by those constantly employing the sympathy/you are a nazie dichotomy.
Is it just a coincidence that the number 6 million has been highlighted for centuries (and available for peer reviewed study from BEFORE WW11 when mentioned in the preceeding decades in relation to 'jewish peril') as being the number of burnt offerings necessary for the establishment of the third temple?
Open and free debate is now more necessary than ever.
I have not yet made my mind up on all the issues, have no religious, political or psychological axe to grind (ie, I am not an 'islamofascist', 'nazi' or 'anti-semite') - but will not be bullied into accepting the first legally mandated interpretation of history know to man.
Jewish and proud cannot state openly that [he] considers the possibility of error.
What can you do with such fanatisism? Surely not debate, engage in hypothetical study or address anomolies!?!
We live in a world that is flat, has the sun turn around it and are faced with being stuck with pulled faces whenever the wind changes ... or rather YOU are!
I am free to believe and investigate what I choose how I choose thank you ... no prison bars over my eyelids.
I'm not sure if I believe in the quality of evil ... but if I did, then surely stalin, hitler and sharon would automatically qualify.
Have to agree somewhat with jsl on the Gaza front. No comparrison can be exact, nor the details entirely similar, but the brutal policies enacted towards non jewish gazarians by the zionists is as worse - if not worse - than that handed out to the inhabitants of the Warsaw ghetto.
Mass starvation, exjudicial murder, destruction and appropriation of private property, pass systems that allow the sick and the needy to expire and suffer on the whim of ignorant overlords do not a pretty site make.
It is only natural for people to want to understand where such wanton and calculated cruelty springs from and to examine in the full the claims of victimisation from those groups so readily involved.
That such investigation is illegal in many places, taboo in many many more and universally treated with hysteria and quite shockingly vile abuse if it strays from the path of guilt and reparations is a bit of a give away for those willing to use their critical facualties.
Yes millions of $ have been 'pumped' into Palestine. It goes to build hospitals that are bombed from the donated $ billions of weapons given to israel, schools that pupils can't reach without being shot or attacked by settlers. It goes to build infrastructure that is torn down at the slightest excuse or whim. It goes to building a viable economy that is wrecked by the border guards of crossings arbitarily closed or bulldozed out of existance for the security of illegal occupiers.
... and yet, 'jewish and proud' and other idiots like him see nothing wrong. they see only the good things that come out of it for their special tribe and fuck the rest of us.
News for you son, the rest of us are mighty pissed off by now ... you'd do better offering up some consideration and apologies than banging on in the same arrogant quack quack.
Yet again 'historian' seems to think that only he has read widely on this subject and that those that disagree with his supposed learned stance are themselves ignorant ... a classic logical fallacy if ever I saw one, and mighty big-headed to boot.
... but enough ... enough. Peace to all of you and yours.
The truth will out.
jackslucid
e-mail:
jackslucid@hotmail.com
You claim...
20.12.2006 21:09
And as for your mentioning of the atrocities perpetuated by the Russians - you will notice that no-one here is disputing that they took place. No one here is asking 'where are the bodies', 'could you dig them up please so I can see for myself'!! That only seems to apply to the jews, Jack, why is that? As for your contention that Stalin's regime was staffed almost exclusively by jews,you make no mention of the anti-zionist purges made by Stalin. What makes you think these atrocites were not pursued by those with an ideological commitment to Stalinist Communism who hated organised religion Jack, when did these actions become the sole preserve of Russian Jews with a specifically Jewish agenda? I do not blame Germans today for what happened in Nazi Germany, yet you seem quite content to lay the Stalinist atrocities firmly at the feet of the Jews, Jack. Why is that? As is often the case with revisionists, why the change of subject? How does this revelation affect the holocaust?, are you admitting that the holocaust took place after all, just that should be seen in moral relativist terms? Or are you saying that Nazi crimes are a lie but you are quite happy not to ask any questions about the numbers killed by Stalin?
You claim to have read widely Jack, but you seem to wish to ignore the fact that the evidence of the holocaust lies in much more than the testimonies of both survivors and perpetrators, and seem completely unwilling to challenge any of the blatant lies of the holocaust deniers.
Historian
what is the point ...
20.12.2006 21:59
... of discourse with somebody who admits no error and dismisses the voices raised against them so stridently?
answer: none.
However, since I am a stupid bigot & I don't know any better, when I have rested suitable, I will try and determine if there are any valid questions raised in your tired 'expert speaks' diatribe and answer accordingly.
In the meantime, remove the cork, you pompous overbearing little man (as in Wilhelm Reichs 'little men').
jackslucid
e-mail:
jackslucid@hotmail.com
I believe
20.12.2006 22:10
Besides, what is wrong in attemptng to find the truth by positing contrary arguments? Otherwise known as playing the 'devils advocate', this method does not require that the researcher believe in one thing or the other, a point that my fellow 'historian' is struggling with (and failing, instead pulling the familiar 'rank' trick of that class of arrant nave who see no error in their world view).
If there is confusion in our monikers here, perhaps you should not have chosen such a universal one (or perhaps you were trying to invoke visions of heterodoxy in our dewy eyed readers?).
Historian
Correction to a lost Comment.
20.12.2006 23:44
I have been querying along that line for some time now, but what I heard of as being the duty of a Moslem was to kill those who would not convert unless they are people of the book. The book here refered to is what Christians would call the Old Testament which is a book of Jewish History. That means Moslems are expressly instructed not to kill Jews or Christians who refuse to convert to Moslem.
I keep on asking for chapter and verse of that instuction but have not yet had an accurate answer. though one who denies that Mohamet composed the Satanic Verses says that no such instruction exists in the Koran.
Ilyan
That’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard
21.12.2006 02:55
It is often said that history is written by the winners - and thus, invariably, it is subjectively recorded, consequently creating an exaggerated or inaccurate account of what actually happened. Fair enough, I can believe that.
Yet, if you even suggest that the official historic account of the holocaust may have been subjectively recorded, consequently creating a partially exaggerated or inaccurate account of what actually happened, then you are a holocaust denier..
Go figure!
If you ask me, that type of fuzzy logic belong with that other more familiar accusation of; If you criticise Israel’s brutal treatment of the Palestinians you are an anti-Semite. Or George Bush’s; “you’re either with us, or you’re with the enemy”.
Quite frankly, after reading some of the nonsense written in this thread, I’m even more inclined to believe that history has painted a one-sided perspective. After all, that same perspective is accepted by a group of people (Zionists) with a notoriously very one-sided perspective, and they are using that same historical account to silence any criticism of their inhumane cruelty – even though we don’t forgive a child abuser just because they may have been previously abused themselves. Nor should we, or else the world would soon be full of abused children.
Objective Perspective
Legitimate enquiry?
21.12.2006 08:21
And frankly, this has nothing to do with playing devil's advocate or being unwilling to accept other people's opinions. In one of his earlier posts Jack called the Holocaust a 'hoax' which seems to indicate he has a pretty fixed opinion of its veracity anyway and sounds pretty much like 'denial' to me. There is a significant difference between offering up a range of evidence (and presenting that evidence in clear, unambiguous footnotes that can be traced and verified) and saying that your own argument follows one path, rather than another. It is another matter altogether to deliberately mislead and distort, by clearly omitting other evidence and misquoting and misreferencing bits to suit your own purposes, such as Irving's disengenous interpretation of the word 'ausrotten'. All historians make errors, but when someone like Irving consistently makes a series of errors and ommissions which just so happen to exonerate Hitler or mimimise complicity of the Nazi's in the persecution of the jews, that goes beyond coincidence and becomes deliberate and overt misrepesentation of the available evidence. You may see this as legitimate historical practice, I do not.
The fact remains that there are thousands of documents and eyewitnesses to the Holocaust, not just from survivors (and please kindly explain to me, other historian, for what legitimate historical purpose you would dismiss out of hand the testimony of all of those witnesses), but from perpetrators as well, are all these accounts to be dismissed out of hand also as 'forced' - on what legitimate grounds would you do this? I have never seen a convincing explanation of why the testimony of someone like Rudolph Hoess, Commandant of Auschwitz, should simply be dismissed out of hand. Even Irving has admitted his theories are a bit stuffed after examing the Eichmann papers - are all these papers forgeries? How was this great hoax perpetrated? How did these thousands of documents find their way into numerous archives and who briefed all the thousands of survivors about what to say? However much you want to dress up Nuremburg as victor's justice, the Nazi's were condemned by their own records. Are you not even remotely suspicious of the fact that the only people now stepping forward claiming these documents are 'forgeries' happen to be a small number of Hitler apologists who, as it just so happens, do not like Jews much either?
Why do 'revisonist' historians persist in making completely erroneous statements such as 'it was widely accepted that four million dies at Auschwitz, now it is has been reduced to 1 million, how does the missing 3 million affect the alleged six million total'? Take a look at any reputable history work on th Holocaust and you will see that the 4 million Soviet estimate was never 'widely accepted' by historians at all, the figure has always been around 1 million, so the 'six million' figure is not affected at all.
I apologise if by 'stridently' taking people to task for claiming the holocaust is a hoax, I have offended anyone. But I say again, is it not far more offensive to effectively turn round to people and tell them that as you are opposed to the state of Israel, you have decided that their wartime experiences are entirely imaginary and that their suffering never actually occurred?
Historian (the other one)
well, actually I will echo you here
21.12.2006 14:30
I do not seek to deny the suffering of ANY of the 250 million people and their families killed inbetween the years 1939 - 45 for the cause of empire, nation and capital, rather I seek to understand why it is so many distortions are allowed a free ride.
You claim that the revised figures of Auschwitz are irellivant!?!
Although my maths is shaky, 6 minus 3 does NOT equal 6 again ... and the fact that it was the world jewish council making this revision seems to have passed by the sensitive dispositions of historical hysterics.
In all my reading around the issues, I have not yet come across a reasonable explanation for the lack of evidence pertaining to the complete cremation of so many bodies, in such a small space and given the extreme shortage of suitable fuels etc.
The lack of contemporary accounts of this industrialised murder, the contradictions contained within statements seemingly from the same time and place, the contradictions when compared with information gathered by the red cross, the huge sums of money demanded & overseen by organisation exclusively commited to the emergence and perserverence of the state of israel (not to mention the creative accounting that has seen much of the $$$ 'disappear' find its way into PR or even private hands) raises my suspecion further.
The absurd mess of head counts then and now, the ridiculous fantasies that have been largely withdrawn or exposed (even by respectable jewish organisations) and the admission of fictional largess by many of those authors who found fame in retelling 'their story' has my head reeling with trying to reconcile what I know through my relatives to have been a stark, disgusting and painful period with what I can percieve as a convienient smokescreen and fig leaf for those with similar attitudes towards non tribal members as the nazies had.
Finally, the taboo, hysteria and legal sanction against investigation has my hackles up and points towards a narrative that is struggling to maintain dominance in a world where information (admittedly as much of it false as it is genuine) travels faster, further and deeper than before.
To those members of my circle and family that still persist in thinking of themselves as that sub-catagory of human called 'jew' ... you know that I love you (although you don't know it is me writing this because experience has shown that it is best to avoid any kind of noteriety in these matters) as I do all life forms.
I choose not to catagorise myself in any nationalistic, religious or tribal manner - bar my weakness for refering to myself as a 'cockney gooona' - nor do I choose to kill my fellows for food, clothing or beliefs, or to exploit them for money, power or sex ... although I reserve the right to abandon pacifistic leanings when faced with a determined aggressor and find common cause with those peoples around the world who have been forced into similar compromises.
And as for people like Rudolph Hoess - who ran their dispicable little domains for profit if not pleasure - I have no sympathy, but note in passing that the emergence of their treatment in the hands of their captors lends itself to the belief that they might have said anything to avoid both the direct and future consequences of their inprisonment.
Peace and love to all that have the heart for it.
jackslucid
e-mail:
jackslucid@hotmail.com
fao Jackslucid
21.12.2006 14:59
Why was the extreme left not up in arms about this? why did it not feature on the front page of any newspaper? why did you and your truth twisting friends not refer to the Jordanians as Nazis?
Please answer!
On the issue of the Holocaust. are the testimonies of the survivors with their tatooed arms, telling of crematoria burning day and night not enough for you? are they all lying?
Of course it is illogical to waste fuel resources on burning millions of murdered people. Was this slaughter the action of logic?
Please stop referring to yourself as Jewish - there is no Judaism in you, if there was once your soul is now truly dead. Yitkadal v'yitkadal shemeh rabba !!!
jEWISH & pROUD
You misunderstand me Jack
21.12.2006 15:53
Go in peace
Historian
ok
21.12.2006 16:37
j&p:
I am not here representing 'the extreme left' ... perhaps you might address your enquiries to someone who is.
I have not, nor will I refer to myself as jewish ... because I am not! The idiocy that allows ones ancestors to define ones religious outlook has not rubbed off on me.
jackslucid
e-mail:
jackslucid@hotmail.com
Desecration of Memory
22.12.2006 09:07
For those who actually want to consider sources by a leading historian on this subject, please refer to
The Holocaust: A History of the Jews of Europe During the Second World War by Martin Gilbert (Dr. Martin Gilbert, a fellow of Merton College, Oxford, is the official biographer of Winston Churchill. He has published more than thirty books and atlases. He is one of England's most distinguished and versatile historians.)
Destruction of the European Jews by Raul Hilberg
Eyewitness Auschwitz: Three Years in the Gas Chambers by Filip Muller
Survival In Auschwitz by Primo Levi
Ghetto in Flames: The Struggle and Destruction of the Jews in Vilna in the Holocaust by Yitzhak Arad
I have also included below an extract of an essay by Prof Martin Gilbert:
"The Final Solution"--An Essay by Martin Gilbert
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Martin Gilbert
[NOTE: Internal references are to other articles included in the Oxford Companion to World War II]
Final Solution (Endlösung) was the term used for the murder of six million Jews during the Second World War. These Jews were citizens of every pre-war state in Europe. Their Jewishness had been defined by the German Nuremberg Laws of 1935 as any person with one Jewish grandparent. Many were Jews only by the Nazi definition; in their own eyes they were Germans, Frenchmen, Belgians, Dutchmen, and so on. A number had been practising Christians for several generations.
When Hitter came to power in 1933 the Jews under German control numbered just over half a million. Hitler and his Nazi Party were pledged to create a Germany in which the German Jews would be set apart from their fellow-Germans, and denied their place as an integral part of German life and culture. The concept of racial purity was paralleled with the stimulation of racial hatred, to create the image of the German Jew as different, alien, and dangerous.
The first measure based upon this Nazi ideology was the expulsion of German Jews from many hundreds of villages and small towns in which they lived and worked, and in which their ancestors had lived for many centuries; the first record of Jews in the Rhineland precedes the Hitler era by more than a thousand years. This first solution of what the Nazis called the ‘Jewish Question’ (Judenfrage) was to make hundreds of municipalities ‘Jew-free’ (Judenrein). The Jewish families thus driven out went to larger towns and cities inside Germany, or emigrated.
Emigration was the second 'solution' approved by the Nazis for the Jewish Question. From 1933 until the outbreak of war in 1939, the official policy of the German government permitted, and even encouraged, emigration. The property of the Jews who left, their shops, their livelihoods, their homes and their furniture, became part of the spoils of racism. Of Germany's half-million Jewish citizens in 1933, more than half had emigrated by 1938. Of these, more than 100,000 found refuge in the USA, 63,000 in Argentina, 52,000 in the UK and 33,000 in Palestine.
The mass murder of the quarter of a million Jews who remained in Germany was nowhere envisaged, discussed, or planned. Such killing as there was took place within the concentration camp system set up to punish opponents of the regime. In the years 1933 to 1938 fewer than a hundred Jews were among several thousand German citizens murdered in concentration camps (principally at Sachsenhausen, Buchenwald, and Dachau).
With the annexation of Austria in March 1938 and of Bohemia and Moravia in March 1939 (see CZECHOSLOVAKIA) the number of Jews under German rule increased by another quarter of a million. Still there was no policy of mass murder. Such violence as there was remained on a relatively small scale. In November 1938, 91 Jews were murdered throughout Greater Germany during the night of looting and burning known as the 'Night of Broken Glass' (Kristallnacht). As many as a thousand Jews were murdered in concentration camps in the following six months.
In the eyes of the German government, the 'solution' to the increased number of Jews within the Reich remained emigration. More than 100,000 of Austria's 160,000 Jews now emigrated; most of them to the UK, the USA, and Palestine, to which they took their talent in many professions, including scientists, doctors, writers, and musicians.
Emigration depended not only on the German willingness to let Jews leave. but also on the willingness of other states to take them in. Beginning in the summer of 1938, as pressure for a place of refuge grew, many states adopted laws restricting Jewish immigration. Another problem for the Jews who left Germany was that they could not know which countries would remain safe; the tens of thousands of Jews who found refuge in France, Belgium, and the Netherlands, for example (as did the German-Jewish girl Anne Frank and her family), could not know that the countries which took their in would, in due course, be overrun by Germany.
With the German invasion of Poland in September 1939 (see POLISH CAMPAIGN), a further million and a half Jews came under German rule. During the murder in the streets of more than 10,000 Polish civilians in September and October 1939, an orgy of slaughter unprecedented in Europe in the 20th century, 3,000 Polish Jews were among those killed; some of them were forced into synagogues and then burnt alive. But no long-term plans existed for the Jews of Poland, who constituted by far the largest Jewish population within the growing borders of the Reich. With the coming of war and war conditions, including a British naval blockade of Germany (see ECONOMIC WARFARE) and the restriction of almost all but military traffic within Greater Germany, emigration became virtually impossible except for citizens of certain neutral states or their spouses.
Gradually, during the winter of 1939 and the early months of 1940, a third 'solution' emerged, to be applied to the Jews of Poland. They would be expelled from several thousand localities in which they had lived hitherto, and made to live in restricted areas. A medieval concept, that of the ghetto, was revived. But whereas in medieval times the ghetto, such as the one in Venice, was a centre of Jewish creativity, under the Nazi scheme it was a place of confinement and poverty.
From the spring of 1940 Jews throughout German-occupied and annexed Poland were driven out of the towns and villages in which they had lived for centuries, and sent to specially-designated areas in certain towns. They were also driven out of many parts of the principal cities, such as Warsaw and Lódz, in which they had lived hitherto, and were forced into an area which was too small for their numbers, often lacking adequate sanitary facilities, and deliberately so. The food ration imposed upon them was even smaller than that imposed upon the non-Jewish inhabitants of Poland. Anyone trying to leave the ghetto, or trying to smuggle food into the ghetto, faced execution.
By April 1941 ghettos had been enforced throughout German-occupied Poland. By June the death toll from starvation had reached 2,000 a month in the Warsaw Ghetto (where half a million Jews were confined), and 800 a month in the Lódz Ghetto (where a quarter of a million were confined). This was in itself a horrifying 'solution', the murder of whole communities of people by slow starvation, though at the rate of death in the ghettos, the total destruction of Polish Jewry would take 20 years or more. No other solution was then in prospect. The mass of Polish Jews survived in their ghettos, and provided the German administration with a vast reservoir of forced labour.
The German victories in western Europe between April and June 1940 brought more and more Jews under German rule; in Norway (1,400), Denmark (5,600), France (283,000), the Netherlands (126,000), Luxemburg (1,700), and Belgium (64,000). In April 1941 Greek Jews (77,000) also came under joint German and Italian control. These western European and Balkan Jews were subjected to civic disabilities, and obliged to a yellow badge on their clothing to identify them (another medieval practice revived). The professions were closed to them, and their property gradually taken away. But their lives were safe; indeed, a few could still emigrate, and did so; others were able to flee for safety to neutral Switzerland, Spain, Portugal, and Turkey.
In June 1941 the German Army invaded the Soviet Union (see BARBAROSSA). Immediately following the troops were special killing squads or Einsatzgruppen, whose orders were to murder Jews in every locality. This was the fourth 'solution' after expulsion, emigration, and ghettoization. It led, within six months, to the murder of as many as a million Jews. The aim of the killing squads was to eliminate Jewish life altogether. In hundreds of small villages in what, up to 1939, had been eastern Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia, and in western Russia, this destructive aim was fulfilled within a few hours. The killing was made easier by the active participation of local police and paramilitary groups, especially in Lithuania and the Ukraine. In Bessarabia, Moldavia, and parts of southern Russia, the killing was carried out by Romanians.
In cities with large Jewish populations, thousands were murdered within a few days; at Kiev, a total of 33,000 Jewish men, women, and children were killed in three days, having been taken to Babi Yar, a ravine on the outskirts of the city, and machine-gunned. Tens of thousands of Jews were shot down in ditches, gravel pits, and fields near every town and village in the vast area through which the Germans advanced in the summer and autumn of 1941.
These killing places, some of them pre-war beauty spots, quickly became synonymous with mass murder: Ponar near Wilno, Kaiserwald near Riga, the Ninth Fort at Kovno, the Ratomskaya ravine at Minsk, and the Drobitsky ravine at Kharkov were five of the most terrible. Other cities with large Jewish populations, such as Kishinev and Odessa, were likewise the scene of massive slaughter.
By October 1941 each of the four 'solutions’ so far put into practice was still in effect. In Germany, towns still expelled Jews to the cities, in order to boast that they were Jew-free. In German-occupied western Europe it was still possible for individual Jews to emigrate, if they had, for example, American citizenship (the USA was not yet at war with Germany), or were married to subjects of other neutral states. In German-occupied Poland, more than two million Jews were still confined to ghettos, many of them forced to work in factories manufacturing clothing for the German Army. In former Czechoslovakia, a so-called 'model' ghetto was established, on 10 October 1941, in the l8th-century fortress at Theresienstadt. Jews were deported there from Prague, Brno, and several hundred other towns and villages in Bohemia and Moravia.
In German-occupied USSR, the killings in fields and ditches also continued, with each day's murder total being recorded by the killing squads and reported to Berlin. On 24 October 1941, for example, 4,000 Jews were taken from Wilno to Ponar and murdered there during the following three days; according to the precise statistics submitted by the killing squad as a matter of routine to Berlin, the murdered Jews included 885 children.
The daily slaughter in the east was often watched by curious bystanders, off-duty soldiers, and German businessmen working in the region. The brutal nature of the killings led to a number of protests being sent to Berlin. One protest, dated 27 October, was forwarded to Berlin by Wilhelm Kube, the commissioner-general of Belorussia (whose headquarters were in Minsk) with the comment 'To have buried alive seriously wounded people, who then worked their way out of their graves again, is such extreme beastliness that this incident must be reported to the Führer.'
Even as these protests reached Berlin, a fifth solution was under discussion there. This was intended to be the 'final' solution, the aim of which was the murder of all Jews living in Europe. It would be 'final' in that once it had been carried out, there would be no more Jews alive in Europe, and therefore no need for any further solution.
Since the German annexation of Austria in March 1938, the bureaucratic aspects of the emigration of Jews had been entrusted to a small government department in Berlin, the 'Central Office for Jewish Emigration', headed by an SS officer, Adolf Eichmann. In the autumn of 1941, Eichmann was put in charge of a new department, the 'Race and Resettlement Office', a section of the RSHAs Amt IV, and was entrusted with the task of preparing the mechanics of the final solution. In an official letter to the German foreign office about an emigration application from a Jewish woman who wished to move from Germany to the unoccupied zone of France, he explained (on 28 October 1941) that the application had to be turned down 'in view of the approaching final solution of the European Jewry problem'.
Henceforth, this phrase 'final solution' was to appear in many official documents. The 'solution' itself was as follows: Jews living throughout Europe, whether confined in the Polish ghettos or still living in their own homes in western Europe, were to be rounded up (wherever possible this was to be done by French, Dutch, Belgian, or other local police), detained locally in special holding camps, and then deported by train to distant camps in which they would be murdered by gas. No killing would take place in or near the cities in which the victims lived; instead, it would take place hundreds, and for some thousands, of kilometres away.
During the autumn of 1941 experiments were made on Soviet prisoners-of-war, and also on Jews, to find out the most expeditious method of murder by gas; the one in which the victims would have the least warning, if any, and in which the least number of operatives would be needed. Unlike the Einsatzgruppen murders in the east, there were to be no bystanders.
Central to this plan were the elements of secrecy and deception. 'Deportation' was to be called 'resettlement'. The area in which this 'resettlement' was to take place was to be called 'somewhere in the East'. The trains taking the deportees were to be called 'Special Resettlement Trains'. The nature of the camps was to be kept secret, even from those who had to drive the trains to within a few kilometres of them.
Two methods of mass murder were devised. The first was by means of gas vans in which the deportees would be taken as if on a journey to a labour camp, but would in fact be killed by exhaust fumes during the short drive from the station to the camp itself. The second was by means of specially-designed gas chambers, into which they would be taken as if for a shower, and inside which, once the doors were locked, they would be killed by gas (see ZYKLON-B). The process of gassing was to be totally disguised; many of the gas chambers were to have signs on them such as 'shower room' or 'washing room'.
The camp sites chosen for the reception and murder of the deported Jews were in remote areas, four in German-occupied Poland and one in occupied USSR. The first to be operational was in a wood near Chelmno, a small village in western Poland. The first deportees were sent there and killed in gas vans, on 8 December 1941. On that day 2,300 Jews were murdered at Chelmno. In the coming months, at least a thousand were killed each day, most of them brought by train from the Lúdz Ghetto and the towns around Lúdz, until as many as 400,000 had been killed.
On 20 January 1942, six weeks after the start of the daily deportations and gassings at Chelmno, a group of senior German civil servants gathered at a villa near Berlin, in the suburb of Wannsee, to co-ordinate the activities of the various government departments, including the state railways, the foreign office and the 'Race and Resettlement Office', all of whose active cooperation was needed to carry out the deportation of Jews from throughout Europe. Statistics were prepared for the Wannsee conference by Eichmann, giving the number of Jews whom it was hoped would be rounded up and deported. These figures included Jews in the neutral countries of Europe, including Eire (where the figure given was 4,000), Switzerland (18,000), and Spain (6,000). Also included on the Wannsee list were the Jews of Britain, estimated by Eichmann at 330,000. All were to be brought into the net of deportation and destruction.
Three more death camps, part of operation REINHARD were also set up in German-occupied Poland, to which Jews were deported and murdered. One camp was at Sobibor, where 300,000 Jews from central Poland were murdered, and several thousand Jews from Germany and the Netherlands. Another camp was at *Belzec, where, beginning in March 1942, 600,000 Jews from western and eastern Galicia, including Cracow and Lwów, were murdered, as well as 1,500 Poles, killed for trying to help Jews. The third camp was at Treblinka, where at least 700,000 Polish Jews were murdered, including half a million from the Warsaw Ghetto, from which the first deportations took place on 22 July 1942. Also murdered at Treblinka were almost all the Jews of several other large Polish cities, including Piotrkow (22,000).
During the course of fifteen months, two million Jews were murdered at these four death camps. A further million had been murdered by the Einsatzgruppen in the east. As a result of this systematic killing, the Jewish populations of Poland, the Baltic States, and the USSR as far east as the Caucasus, had been almost entirely destroyed by the beginning of 1943. The few Jews still alive in those regions worked in forced-labour camps, at specific tasks needed by the German Army.
The Final Solution, so effective in the east, was also intended to include all the Jews of western Europe. Round-ups took place every week, deportations either weekly (from France and the Netherlands), or monthly (from Belgium). All those who were rounded up were deported by train to the east. Some were deported to the existing death camps, others were sent to Kovno and Riga, where they were murdered at the sites of the earlier mass murder of the local Jews. At Riga, gas vans were used.
Among the Jews deported to Treblinka and murdered were 8,000 from Theresienstadt and 12,000 from 23 Balkan Jewish communities in distant Macedonia and Thrace; they traced their origins to the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492. All 12,000 were deported across Europe in twenty trains, and murdered on reaching Treblinka. Other Jews, possibly as many as 250,000, and including 22,000 from Theresienstadt, were deported from western Europe to Maly Trostenets, a small village outside the Belorussian city of Minsk, where they were killed in gas vans similar to those used at Chelmno and Riga. Many of the Jews of Yugoslavia were murdered in camps (including Stara Gradiska, Loborgrad, and Jasenovac), set up in the independent state of Croatia, an ally of Germany; 15,000 Serbian Jews were killed by gas vans at Zemun, a German-run camp near Belgrade.
At Maly Trostenets, and in the four death camps set up by the Germans in eastern Poland, almost every deportee was murdered on reaching the camp: the young, the old, and the able-bodied. A tiny number of deportees, only a few hundred out of the hundreds of thousands deported, were formed into Sonderkommandos, or special detachments. They were kept in a special section of each camp, under heavy guard, and forced to take the bodies of those killed to pits where they were buried or burned; or to sort out the clothes of those who had been murdered for shipment back to Germany. These slave-labourers were then murdered in their turn.
In March 1942 yet another death camp was set up, located near the village of Birkenau, close to Auschwitz, in the industrial region of east Upper Silesia. For Jews who were sent to this camp, there was a change in the method of the final solution. The region, rich in coal, was part of German-annexed Poland. Several hundred German factories had been relocated here; they, and the existing coal mines, required slave labour on a substantial scale. Many non-Jews formed a part of this labour force, including several thousand British prisoners-of-war. But the need for even more manpower had become urgent, as Germany approached its third year at war, and had still failed either to conquer the USSR or to invade the UK.
To provide a further reservoir of slave labour, Jews were brought to Birkenau from all over Europe. Unlike the murder system already in operation at the existing death camps, not every deportee to Birkenau was murdered. While all children, all old people, and the sick, were taken from the deportation trains and sent straight to the gas chambers, several hundred able-bodied men and women from each deportation train (sometimes as many as 500 in a train with a thousand deportees) were separated from those about to be killed, and had a serial number tattooed on their forearm; at least in the short term their lives were spared; they were sent to barracks from which they would go each day to their slave labour tasks.
The camp at Birkenau consisted of a large area of wooden huts and brick barracks, and two (later four) gas chambers, attached to which were crematoria in which the bodies of those murdered were burned almost at once. Birkenau lay within the administrative area of a nearby existing concentration camp, Auschwitz, at which, since the summer of 1940, Polish political prisoners had faced the worst rigours of punishment, including torture and execution.
Some Polish Jews had already been among the victims at Auschwitz. But Birkenau was established for Jews alone, and with a view to continuing the Final Solution, already so effective elsewhere, by the murder of at least half of those who arrived in each deportation train. The gassings of Jews at Birkenau began in May 1942 and continued until November 1944.
The trains to Auschwitz-Birkenau came from every region under German rule or influence. Usually there were a thousand deportees in each train. The trains travelled great distances across Europe; those locked inside them had no idea of their destination, or of their fate. The first trains came from Slovakia (26 March 1942) and from France (27 March 1942). In both instances, local police, Slovak and French, carried out the task of rounding up Jews, assembling them, and putting them on the trains. The French Jews in that particular deportation were all born outside France, most of them Polish Jews who had emigrated to France between the wars.
During two and a half years, without respite or interruption, trains brought Jews to Auschwitz-Birkenau from as far north as Norway, as far west as the Atlantic coast of France, as far south as Rome, Corfu, and Athens, as far east as Transylvania and Ruthenia. Among the large Jewish communities murdered almost in their entirety at Birkenau were those of the Greek city of Salonika (more than 40,000 murdered), the Polish city of Bialystok (more than 10,000), the Greek island of Corfu (1,800), and the Aegean island of Rhodes (1,700). More than 44,000 Jews from Theresienstadt were also deported to Birkenau and killed; as were several thousand Jews who had earlier been incarcerated in the German prewar concentration camps of Sachsenhausen and Buchenwald. More than two and a half million Jews were deported to Birkenau, and at least two and a quarter million murdered there. In addition to those taken straight from the trains to the gas chambers, at least three-quarters of the slave labourers were among the victims, toiled to death, killed by sadistic guards, or sent to the gas chambers when they fell sick.
The aim of the Final Solution was to murder all the Jews of Europe. In this it failed, despite the terrifyingly high death toll. In June 1944 the Anglo-American forces landed in Normandy (see OVERLORD), and the Red Army was on the border of eastern Galicia. Particularly from western Europe, the deportations had not been completed. From France, 83,000 Jews had been deported and murdered, but 200,000 were still alive, many of them sheltered from deportation by their fellow French citizens. From Italy, 8,000 Jews had been deported to their deaths, but 35,000 were still in Italy at the end of the war, and thus survived. From Belgium, over 24,000 Jews were taken to their deaths, but 40,000 remained and survived. Elsewhere, the ratio of survivors to those murdered was much worse. Only 20,000 Dutch Jews remained undeported; 106,000 were deported and killed. Of Yugoslavia's Jews, 60,000 were killed, and only 12,000 survived. From Greece, 65,000 were taken to their deaths, and only 12,000 survived.
Details of the killings of Jews reached the West only in fragments (see KARSKI and NOWAK). Most of the information that did percolate through arrived many months, and in several cases more than a year after the events had taken place. Publicity was given to the details as they emerged, but publicity could not halt the killings, which were taking place deep in the heartland of German-occupied Europe, far beyond the range of Allied bombers, and almost three years before the Allied armies were able to advance into central Europe. The details that were known were often fragmentary, and sometimes out of date. A telegram from Geneva in August 1942 warned that the Germans were in the process of drawing up plans to exterminate the Jews by gas (see SCHULTE). In fact, those plans had already been in operation for eight months.
In the autumn of 1942 news of the deportations from France was widely publicized in the British newspapers, and universally denounced. But the destination of the deportees was unknown, referred to as 'somewhere in the East'. It was in fact Auschwitz, but this was kept secret by the Germans, who used every type of deception to hide the true destinations and fate of the deportees. Details of the killing of Jews at Auschwitz II (Birkenau) did not reach Geneva, London, and New York until the summer of 1944, a full two years after the killings had begun. International protest against the deportation and killing of Hungarian Jews was then effective, but only because the tide of war had turned, and Allied aircraft could at last reach Budapest. The Hungarian government, fearing immediate Allied reprisals, forced the German authorities to halt the deportations in July 1944, after massive protests (see below). Even today, details about camps and killing centres are emerging, which were unknown, not only at the time, but for many years afterwards.
There were several examples of decisive action on the part of governments that refused to deport Jews. All 50,000 Bulgarian Jews survived the war because King Boris and the Bulgarian parliament refused the German request to send them to the camps in Poland. In Denmark, with the encouragement of King Frederik IX (1899-1972) almost all 5,500 Jews were taken during a single night by small boats across the narrow water to neutral Sweden, and safety. After the first fifteen deportees from Finland had been murdered, the Finnish government rejected all German pressure to deport the remaining 2,000 Jews, many of whom were refugees from Germany and Central Europe.
Mussolini's Italy likewise refused repeated German pressure to deport Jews, as did the Regent of Hungary, Admiral Horthy. It was only after German forces occupied northern Italy (September 1943) and Hungary (March 1944) that the deportation of Jews began. After 400,000 Jews had been deported to their deaths from Hungary to Auschwitz-Birkenau, within the space of three months, Horthy, under pressure from Pope Pius XII, from King Gustav V of Sweden (1858-1950), and from the western Allies, demanded a halt to any further deportations. More than 300,000 Hungarian Jews were thereby saved; though several thousand were subsequently murdered by Hungarian Fascist gangs such as the Arrow Cross (see HUNGARY, 3), others were saved from the gangs by the intervention of several foreign diplomats in Budapest, including the senior Swedish representative in the city, Raoul Wallenberg.
Like each of the captive peoples of Europe, the Jews were subjected to all the rigours of occupation, as well as the total isolation imposed on the ghettos. Nevertheless, their resistance to deportation was widespread. Best known is the Warsaw rising of April 1943. Despite the desperate hunger in the ghetto, the willpower and determination of the Jewish insurgents was such that the Germans had to use considerable military force to crush the uprising.
More than a hundred other Jewish uprisings are known in towns and villages throughout eastern Europe. There were also acts of defiance in every death camp. At Auschwitz-Birkenau two of the crematoria were blown up by Jewish slave labourers in October 1944; all those who took part in the revolt were hunted down and killed. Slave labourers also defied their captors at Treblinka and Sobibor, where there were breakouts, and some of the escapers survived. Other Jews managed to escape from the ghettos into the forests, and to join, and even to form, partisan units, harassing German lines of communication, and trying to protect small groups of women and children who had also escaped. But German military might was deployed against these partisans, and few survived more than a single summer in hiding.
Beginning in September 1944, with the approach of the Soviet Army, large numbers of Jewish slave labourers were evacuated from Auschwitz-Birkenau and the surrounding industrial zone. Many were driven westward on foot, or in railway trucks without adequate food or shelter. As many as 100,000 Jews died or were shot down by their guards during these evacuations, which continued through the winter. The marchers were sent to central Germany, to build and to work in vast underground factories, and at other slave labour projects intended to help halt the advance of the western Allies, who by January 1945 had reached the Rhine. Many of those on the death marches were toiled and beaten to death in these factories and the camps attached to them (one of the most notorious was Mittelbau-Dora). Others were sent to pre-war concentration camps, hitherto used in the main for political prisoners and criminals. In these camps they were the object of sadistic cruelty and neglect.
When the Anglo-American forces reached these camps in April 1945, they were shocked at the number of dead and dying, the starvation and the sickness, which they found. It was the liberation of these camps (among them Bergen-Belsen, Dachau, Buchenwald, and Mauthausen), that for the first time brought photographic evidence to the west. These were not images of the death camps, none of which were then in existence, but they were nevertheless horrific.
An estimated 300,000 European Jews survived the camps and death marches. Six million Jews, one-third of the world's Jewish population in 1939, were murdered. Most of the survivors left Europe for the USA, South America, Canada, Australia, the UK, and Palestine. There they sought to rebuild their lives, learn new languages, start new families, and live with the continuing torment of the memory of mass murder, and the destruction of their own loved ones and communities.
In many countries, museums and memorials have been set up to remember the victims of the Final Solution, which is known in Yiddish as the Destruction (Churban), in Hebrew as the Catastrophe (Shoah), and, more generally, as the Holocaust. Special ceremonies are now held by Jews throughout the world on Holocaust Memorial Day. The anniversaries of Kristallnacht, and of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, are also widely commemorated.
In the immediate aftermath of the war, several dozen camp commandants and functionaries were executed, some on the spot, others after trials. Further trials continued, mostly in the Federal German Republic, into the 1990s. In 1988, legislation was passed in Canada and Australia to bring to trial perpetrators of mass murder; in 1991 the British parliament approved similar legislation. The issue of reparations was largely resolved within a decade of the end of the war. On 10 September 1952, in Luxemburg City Hall, Israel and West Germany (both of them states which had been created after the war) signed the Luxemburg Treaty, under which the West German government agreed to pay substantial sums of money both to Israel and to Jewish organizations, as reparation for 'material damage' suffered by the Jews at the hands of the Nazis. Communist East Germany refused to participate in this agreement, but in 1990 the newly-established non-communist government of East Germany (subsequently merged with that of West Germany) agreed in principle to the payment of reparations to surviving Jewish victims of Nazi persecution.
Several thousand Jews were saved from deportation and death by non-Jews who, at the risk of their own lives, hid and helped them. On 19 August 1953 the Israeli parliament passed a law making it the duty of the State of Israel to recognize the work done by non-Jews in saving Jewish lives during the war. An expression of honour, 'Righteous among the Nations', was awarded, in the name of the Jewish people, to every non-Jewish person or family who had risked their lives to save Jews. Evidence of such action has to come initially from one of those who were actually saved. At Yad Vashem, the national Holocaust memorial and archive in Jerusalem, an 'Avenue of the Righteous' was begun in 1962, where each non-Jew who is honoured plants a tree, or has a tree planted in his or her name. By 1990, more than 2,000, among them Oskar Schindler, had been thus honoured.
A substantial literature about the Final Solution exists, much of it published in the 1980s and in large part the testimony of survivors. Several ghetto diaries and chronicles have been found and published, including the mass of material assembled in the Warsaw Ghetto by the historian Emanuel Ringelblum and his circle, all of whom perished during the war. Further volumes of the recollections of survivors are published every few days; each one adds something to our existing knowledge of the fate of an estimated ten thousand Jewish communities throughout Europe, whose lives, and also whose life and culture, was destroyed between 1939 and 1945.
From The Oxford Companion to World War II. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1995. Copyright © 1995 by I.C.B. Dear and Oxford University Press
Jewish & Proud
FIGHT THE NATIONAL SOCIALISTS ON INDYMEDIA
22.12.2006 13:18
Holocaust denial is a propaganda movement active in the United States, Canada and Western Europe which seeks to deny the reality of the Nazi regime's systematic mass murder of 6 million Jews in Europe during World War II.
2. Who started the movement?
The roots of Holocaust denial can be found in the bureaucratic language of Nazi policy itself, which sought to camouflage the genocidal intent of what the Nazis called the "Final Solution to the Jewish Question," even as these directives were being carried out. After the war, former Nazis and Nazi sympathizers dismissed the overwhelming proof of the Holocaust established at the Nuremberg war crimes trials; similarly, an obscure group of post-War French Trotskyists and anarchists led by Paul Rassinier (since deceased), seeking to advance their own political agenda, denounced evidence of the genocide as "Stalinist atrocity propaganda."
However, as an organized propaganda movement, Holocaust "revisionism" took root in 1979 when Willis Carto, founder of Liberty Lobby - the largest anti-Jewish propaganda organization in the United States - incorporated the Institute for Historical Review (IHR). The IHR is a pseudo-academic enterprise in which professors with no credentials in history (for example, the late Revilo P. Oliver was a retired University of Illinois Classics teacher; Robert Faurisson earned a Ph.D. in literature from the University of Lyon; Arthur Butz is an engineer at Northwestern University), writers without formal academic certification (such as David Irving, Henri Roques and Bradley Smith), and career anti-Semites (such as Mark Weber, Ernst Zündel and the late David McCalden) convene to develop new outlets for their anti-Jewish, anti-Israel and, for some, pro, Nazi beliefs.
Since 1993, Willis Carto has broken with the IHR in a very public, litigious feud. He has devoted considerable funds and rhetorical vehemence to dis. crediting his former employees, and has also established a rival "revisionist" journal, The Barnes Review. At issue in the feud, primarily, is not the history of the Holocaust - which both sides of the dispute argue never really happened - but rather Carto's reportedly dictatorial management style, and the control of a multimillion-dollar bequest to the parent corporation of the IHR. Although the dispute remains in litigation, as of this writing a Superior Court Judge in California has awarded $6.4 million to the IHR in their civil suit against Carto. The judge, in his ruling for the Institute, characterized Carto as "evasive and argumentative" and added that his testimony in large part "made no sense.... By the end of the trial, I was of the opinion that Mr. Carto lacked candor, lacked memory and lacked the ability to be forthright about what he did honestly remember"; ironically, this description could accurately characterize the entire propaganda movement which Carto founded.
(For further details about this feud and its aftermath, see Liberty Lobby: Hate Central, ADL Research Report, 1995.)
3. Where is Holocaust denial active today?
IHR has tapped into an international network of propagandists who write for the group's Journal of Historical Review (JHR) and meet at its more-or-less annual conventions. The leading activists affiliated with IHR have included Mark Weber, Bradley Smith and Fred Leuchter (USA); Ernst Zündel (Canada); David Irving (England); Robert Faurisson (France); Carlo Mattogno (Italy); and Ahmed Rami (Sweden). Of these activists, Bradley Smith, who served for many years as IHR's "Media Project Director," has attracted the most notoriety in the U.S., due to the series of "revisionist" advertisements which he has placed in college newspapers since 1991 for the Committee for Open Debate on the Holocaust (CODOH).
Nonetheless, IHR has suffered noticeably from its feud with Carto. Since breaking with its founder in 1993, the professional staff at the Institute has shrunk from seven to two - Mark Weber, now serving as director, and Greg Raven, who operates IHR's World Wide Web site - and its increasingly infrequent publications have consisted mostly of reprints from previous issues of the Journal of Historical Review, along with at times desperate appeals for funding. Most recently, IHR announced that its 1996 conference would be postponed indefinitely.
4. What is CODOH?
Though Smith claims the "Committee" is an independent entity devoted to promoting "open debate," it has operated essentially as a vehicle for IHR propaganda. CODOH was first headed by Smith and Mark Weber, then-editor of the JHR; its founder was the late William Curry, a longtime supporter of the IHR. Every other associate of the group has also been a public participant in IHR conferences. CODOH ads and flyers list the IHR address and cite IHR sources almost exclusively. Additionally, Bradley Smith's Web page on the computer Internet - which is fairly elaborate and has constituted the bulk of his activity since 1995 -provides links to the IHR site, as well as other Holocaust-denial outlets. Smith, moreover, appears to have suffered from
the same decline in fortune affecting the IHR. He has not written a new editorial-style advertisement since 1993, and his pre-existing ads appeared in only seven newspapers in 1995, and one in 1996, down from 13 in 1993. Instead, Smith's current campus outreach tends to consist of inconspicuous, anonymous classified ads promoting his Web site; the only indication of Smith's agenda in these ads is a reference to "Unanswered Questions About the Nazi Gas Chambers."
5. Are there other propagandists promoting Holocaust denial on the World Wide Web?
In addition to overt neo-Nazi groups, such as the National Alliance,1 which promote denial of the Holocaust as part of a comprehensive racist and anti-Semitic agenda, one of the most active Holocaust deniers on the computer Internet is the German-born Canadian hatemonger Ernst Zündel Zündel whose anti-Semitic activities extend back to the mid-70s, and include associations with the IHR and the neo-Nazi publication, Liberty Bell, as well as the authorship of books such as The Hitler We Loved and Why, has established perhaps the most extensive Holocaust-denial Web site on the Internet. Often updated daily, Zündel's home page, operated by a previously obscure Southern California writer named Ingrid Rimland, publishes materials in English, French and German and includes audio recordings of Zündel's own speeches. In addition to his Internet activities - which he, like Bradley Smith, promotes by purchasing inconspicuous ads in college and local newspapers - Zündel also produces a cable-access TV program as well as German and English-language shortwave radio broadcasts, each of which is also devoted to Holocaust denial.
6. Are there laws regulating Holocaust denial?
In Canada and Western Europe, Holocaust deniers have been successfully prosecuted under racial defamation or hate crimes laws. In the United States, however, the First Amendment guarantees the right of free speech, regardless of political content. Nonetheless, though the First Amendment guarantees Holocaust deniers the right to produce and distribute their propaganda, it in no way obligates newspapers or other media outlets to provide them with a forum for their views.
7. What do American legal precedents indicate about such propaganda?
The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in a 1974 decision, Miami Herald Publishing Company v. Tornillo , that "A newspaper is more than a passive receptacle or conduit for news, comment and advertising. The choice of material to go into a newspaper... [constitutes] the exercise of editorial control and judgment." Simply stated, to require newspaper editors or broadcasters to provide Smith, or any other individual, with a forum would deny the newspaper or other media their own First Amendment rights to operate a free press, without government coercion; such requirements would also diminish the public's ability to distinguish historical truth from propaganda.
Like the editor of a private newspaper, the editors of all private and most public college newspapers have a First Amendment right to exercise editorial control over which advertisements appear in their newspaper. The only situation in which an editor of a state university newspaper would not have this right would be if the university administration controlled the content of the campus newspaper and set editorial policy. In such a case, the university would essentially function as an arm of the government, and prohibition of newspaper advertisements based on content would violate the First Amendment. There are few universities, however, where the administration exercises this type of control over the student paper.
At public elementary and secondary schools, the administration has the right to refuse to print Holocaust-denial advertisements in a student newspaper; the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in a 1988 decision, Hazelwood School District v. Kuhlmeier, that "educators do not offend the First Amendment by exercising editorial control over. . . the content of student speech in school-sponsored expressive activities so long as their actions are reasonably related to legitimate pedagogical concern." Based on that decision, it is clear that public school officials have the same right as student editors to reject Holocaust-denial advertisements, since this propaganda encourages bias and prejudice, offends many individuals and has a negative educational value.
The one case directly involving the substance of Holocaust-denial propaganda in an American court was a 1985 lawsuit brought against the IHR by Mel Mermelstein, a Holocaust survivor living in Long Beach, California. In the early '80s, Mermelstein had responded to a cynical IHR publicity campaign which offered $50,000 to anyone who could prove that Jews had been gassed at Auschwitz by submitting evidence that members of his own family had been murdered at that concentration camp. When the IHR failed to comply with its promised terms, Mermelstein filed his suit. In July 1985, the lawsuit was settled in Mermelstein's favor. The settlement, approved by judge Robert Wenke of the Los Angeles Superior Court, called for the IHR to pay Mermelstein the $50,000 "reward," as well as an additional $40,000 for pain and suffering. Moreover, at a pre-trial hearing, the Court took judicial notice of the fact that gas chambers had been used to murder Jews at Auschwitz.
Several months later, Mermelstein won another victory against the Holocaust-denial movement. In January 1986, a Los Angeles Superior Court jury awarded Mermelstein $4.75 million in punitive damages and $500,000 in compensatory damages in a suit he had filed in 1981 against Ditlieb Felderer, a Swedish Holocaust denier whose publication, Jewish Information Bulletin (it is in fact none of these), had mocked the killing of Jews at Auschwitz and had attacked Mermelstein personally. Later that year, the IHR and Willis Carto sued Mermelstein, claiming he libeled them during a radio interview given in New York. In 1988, they voluntarily dropped the charges.
8. What have academic authorities said about Holocaust denial?
The History Department at Duke University, responding to a CODOH ad, unanimously adopted and published a statement noting: "That historians are constantly engaged in historical revision is certainly correct; however, what historians do is very different from this advertisement. Historical revision of major events. . . is not concerned with the actuality of these events; rather, it concerns their historical interpretation - their causes and consequences generally. There is no debate among historians about the actuality of the Holocaust... there can be no doubt that the Nazi state systematically put to death millions of Jews, Gypsies, political radicals and other people."
David Oshinsky and Michael Curtis of Rutgers University have written, "If one group advertises that the Holocaust never happened, another can buy space to insist that American Blacks were never enslaved. The stakes are high because college newspapers may soon be flooded with ads that present discredited assertions as if they were part of normal historical debate. If the Holocaust is not a fact, then nothing is a fact...."
Peter Hayes, Associate Professor of History and German at Northwestern University, responded to a Smith ad by stating, "[B]ear in mind that not a single one of the advances in our knowledge since 1945 has been contributed by the self-styled 'Revisionists' whom Smith represents. That is so because contributing to knowledge is decidedly not their purpose . . . . This ad is an assault on the intellectual integrity ... of academicians, whom Smith and his ilk wish to browbeat. It is also a throwback to the worst sorts of conspiracy-mongering of anti-Semitic broadside.... Is it plausible that so great and longstanding a conspiracy of repression could really have functioned? ... That everybody with a Ph.D. active in the field - German, American, Canadian, British, Israeli, etc. - is in on it together?... If one suspects it is, might it not be wise to do a bit of checking about Smith, his organization and his charges before running so implausible an ad?"
Perhaps most significantly, in December 1991, the governing council of the American Historical Association (AHA), the nation's largest and oldest professional organization for historians, unanimously approved a statement condemning the Holocaust-denial movement, stating, "No serious historian questions that the Holocaust took place." The council's action came in response to a petition circulated among members calling for an official statement against Holocaust-denial propaganda; the petition had been signed by more than 300 members attending the organization's annual conference. Moreover, in 1994, the AHA reaffirmed its position in a press release which stated that "the Association will not provide a forum for views that are, at best, a form of academic fraud."
Holocaust Denial Themes
The following are summaries of major assertions employed by Holocaust-denial propagandists, with brief factual responses.
1. The Holocaust Did Not Occur Because There Is No Single "Master Plan" for Jewish Annihilation
There is no single Nazi document that expressly enumerates a "master plan" for the annihilation of European Jewry. Holocaust-denial propagandists misrepresent this fact as an exposure of the Holocaust "hoax"; in doing so, they reveal a fundamentally misleading approach to the history of the era. That there was no single document does not mean there was no plan. The "Final Solution" the Nazis' comprehensive plan to murder all European Jews - was, as the Encyclopedia of the Holocaust observes, "the culmination of a long evolution of Nazi Jewish policy."2 The destruction process was shaped gradually: it was borne of many thousands of directives.3
The development and implementation of this process was overseen and directed by the highest tier of Nazi leadership, including Heinrich Himmler, Reinhard Heydrich, Adolf Eichmann, Hermann Goering and Adolf Hitler himself. For the previous two decades, Hitler had relentlessly pondered Jewish annihilation.4 In a September 16, 1919, letter he wrote that while "the Jewish problem" demanded an "anti-Semitism of reason" - comprising systematic legal and political sanctions - "the final goal, however, must steadfastly remain the removal of the Jews altogether."5
Throughout the 1920s, Hitler maintained that "the Jewish question" was the "pivotal question" for his Party and would be solved "with well-known German thoroughness to the final consequence."6 With his assumption to power in 1933, Hitler's racial notions were implemented by measures that increasingly excluded Jews from German society.
On January 30, 1939, Hitler warned that if Jewish financiers and Bolsheviks initiated war, "The result will not be the Bolshevization of the earth, and thus the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe."7 On September 21, 1939, after the Germans invaded Poland, SD chief Heydrich ordered the Einsatzgruppen (mobile killing units operating in German-occupied territory) to forcibly concentrate Polish Jews into ghettos, alluding to an unspecified "final aim."8
In the summer of 1941, with preparations underway for invading Russia, large-scale mass murder initiatives - already practiced domestically upon the mentally ill and deformed - were broadly enacted against Jews. Heydrich, acting on Hitler's orders, directed the Einsatzgruppen to implement the "special tasks" of annihilation in the Soviet Union of Jews and Soviet commissars.9 On July 31, Heydrich received orders from Goering to prepare plans "for the implementation of the aspired final solution of the Jewish question" in all German-occupied areas.10 Eichmann, while awaiting trial in Israel in 1960, related that Heydrich had told him in August 1941 that "the Führer has ordered the physical extermination of the Jews."11 Rudolf Hoess, the Commandant of Auschwitz, wrote in 1946 that "In the summer of 1941... Himmler said to me, 'The Führer has ordered the Final Solution to the Jewish Question... I have chosen the Auschwitz camp for this purpose.'"12
On January 20, 1942, Heydrich convened the Wannsee Conference to discuss and coordinate implementation of the Final Solution. Eichmann later testified at his trial:
These gentlemen... were discussing the subject quite bluntly, quite differently from the language that I had to use later in the record. During the conversation they minced no words about it at all... they spoke about methods of killing, about liquidation, about extermination.13
Ten days after the conference, while delivering a speech at the Sports Palace in Berlin that was recorded by the Allied monitoring service, Hitler declared: "The result of this war will be the complete annihilation of the Jews... the hour will come when the most evil universal enemy of all time will be finished, at least for a thousand years."14 On February 24, 1943, he stated: "This struggle will not end with the annihilation of Aryan mankind, but with the extermination of the Jewish people in Europe.15
Approximately 6 million Jews were killed in the course of Hitler's Final Solution.
2. There Were No Gas Chambers Used for Mass Murder at Auschwitz and Other Camps
Death camp gas chambers were the primary means of execution used against the Jews during the Holocaust. The Nazis issued a directive implementing large-scale gas chambers in the fall of 1941 but, by then, procedures facilitating mass murder, including the utilization of smaller gas chambers, were already in practice. Before their use in death camps, gas chambers were central to Hitler's "eugenics" pro, gram. Between January 1940 and August 1941, 70,273 Germans - most of them physically handicapped or mentally ill - were gassed, 20-30 at a time, in hermetically shut chambers disguised as shower rooms.16
Meanwhile, mass shooting of Jews had been extensively practiced on the heels of Germany's Eastern campaign. But these actions by murder squads had become an increasingly unwieldy process by October 1941. Three directors of the genocide Erhard Wetzel, head of the Racial-Policy Office: Alfred Rosenberg, consultant on Jewish affairs for the Occupied Eastern Territories, and Victor Brack, deputy director of the Chancellory, met at the time with Adolf Eichmann to discuss the use of gas chambers in the genocide program.17 Thereafter, two technical advisors for the euthanasia gas chambers, Kriminalkommissar Christian Wirth and a Dr. Kallmeyer, were sent to the East to begin construction of mass gas chambers.18 Physicians who had implemented the euthanasia program were also transferred.
Mobile gassing vans, using the exhaust fumes of diesel engines to kill passengers, were used to kill Jews at Chelmno and Treblinka - as well as other sites, not all of them concentration camps - starting in November 1941.19 At least 320,000 Chelmno prisoners, most of them Jews, were killed by this method; a total of 870,000 Jews were murdered at Treblinka using gas vans and diesel-powered gas chambers.20
Gas chambers were installed and operated at Belzec, Lublin, Sobibor, Majdanek and Auschwitz-Birkenau from September 3, 1941, when the first experimental gassing took place at Auschwitz, until November 1944.22 Working with chambers measuring an average 225 square feet, the Nazis forced to their deaths 700 to 800 men, women and children at a time.22 Two-thirds of this program was completed in 1943-44, and at its height it accounted for as many as 20,000 victims per day.23 Authorities have estimated that these gas chambers accounted for the deaths of approximately 2E to 3 million Jews.
Holocaust-denial attacks on this record of mass murder intensified following the end of the Cold War when it was reported that the memorial at Auschwitz was changed in 1991 to read that 1 million had died there, instead of 4 million as previously recorded. For Holocaust deniers, this change appeared to confirm arguments that historical estimates of Holocaust deaths had been deliberately exaggerated, and that scholars were beginning to "retreat" in the face of "revisionist" assertions. Thus, for example, Willis Carto wrote in the February 6, 1995, issue of The Spotlight, the weekly tabloid of his organization, Liberty Lobby, that "All 'experts' until 1991 claimed that 4 million Jews were killed at Auschwitz. This impossible figure was reduced in 1991... to 1.1 million.... The facts about deaths at Auschwitz, however... are still wrong. The Germans kept detailed records of Auschwitz deaths.... These show that no more than 120,000 persons of all religions and ethnicity died at Auschwitz during the war...."
In fact, Western scholars have never supported the figure of 4 million deaths at Auschwitz; the basis of this Soviet estimate - an analysis of the capacity of crematoria at Auschwitz and Birkenau - has long been discredited. As early as 1952, Gerald Reitlinger, a British historian, had convincingly challenged this method of calculation. Using statistics compiled in registers for Himmler, he asserted that approximately 1 million people had died at Auschwitz; Raul Hilberg in 1961, and Yehuda Bauer in 1989, confirmed Reitlinger's estimate of Auschwitz victims. Each of these scholars, nonetheless, has recognized that nearly 6 million Jews were killed overall during the Holocaust.24 Polish authorities were therefore responding to long-accepted Western scholarship, further confirmed subsequently by documents released in post-Soviet Russia; the cynical allegations of "Holocaust revisionism" played no part in their decision.
3. Holocaust Scholars Rely on the Testimony of Survivors Because There Is No Objective Documentation Proving the Nazi Genocide.
Another frequent claim of Holocaust "revisionists" concerns what they describe as the lack of objective documentation proving the facts of the Holocaust, and the reliance by scholars on biased and poorly collected testimonies of survivors. However, the Germans themselves left no shortage of documentation and testimony to these events, and no serious scholar has relied solely on survivor testimony as the conclusive word on Holocaust history. Lucy Dawidowicz, in the preface to her authoritative work, The War Against the Jews 1933-1945, wrote, "The German documents captured by the Allied armies at the war's end have provided an incomparable historical record, which, with regard to volume and accessibility, has been unique in the annals of scholarship.... The National Archives and the American Historical Association jointly have published 67 volumes of Guides to German Records Microfilmed at Alexandria, VA. For my work I have limited myself mainly to published German documents."26 The author then proceeds to list 303 published sources - excluding periodicals -documenting the conclusions of her research. Among these sources are the writings of recognizable Nazi policy makers such as Adolf Hitler, Heinrich Himmler, Rudolf Hoess and Alfred Rosenberg.
Similarly, Raul Hilberg in his three-volume edition of The Destruction of the European Jews, wrote, "Between 1933 and 1945 the public offices and corporate entities of Nazi Germany generated a large volume of correspondence. Some of these documents were destroyed in Allied bombings, and many more were systematically burned in the course of retreats or in anticipation of surrender. Nevertheless, the accumulated paper work of the German bureaucracy was vast enough to survive in significant quantities, and even sensitive folders remained."26
It is thus largely from these primary sources that the history of the Holocaust has been compiled. A new factor in this process is the sudden availability of countless records from the former Soviet Union, many of which had been overlooked or suppressed since their capture at war's end by the Red Army. Needless to say, the modification of specific details in this history is certain to continue for a number of years to come, considering the vastness and complexity of the events which comprise the Holocaust. However, it is equally certain that these modifications will only confirm the Holocaust's enormity, rather than - as the "revisionists" would -call it into question.
4. There Was No Net Loss of Jewish Lives Between 1941 and 1945.
Another frequent "revisionist" assertion calls into question the generally accepted estimates of Jewish victims of the Holocaust. In attempting to portray the deaths of millions of Jews as an exaggeration or a fabrication, Holocaust deniers wildly manipulate reference works, almanac statistics, geopolitical data, bedrock historical facts and other sources of information and reportage.
For example, "revisionists" commonly cite various almanac or atlas figures - typically compiled before comprehensive accounts on the Holocaust were available - that appear to indicate that the worldwide Jewish population before and after World War II remained essentially stable, thereby "proving" that 6 million Jews could not have died during this period.
The widely cited "6 million" figure is derived from the initial 1945 Nuremberg trial estimate of 5.7 million deaths; subsequent censuses, statistical analyses, and other demographic studies of European Jewry have consistently demonstrated the essential accuracy of this first tally.27 After nearly 50 years of study, historians agree that approximately 6 million Jews perished during the course of the Nazi genocide.28
In The War Against the Jews, Lucy Dawidowicz offers a country-by-country accounting of Jewish deaths.29
5. The Nuremberg Trials Were a "Farce of Justice" Staged for the Benefit of the Jews.
Yet another centerpiece of "revisionist" propaganda attacks the objectivity and legal validity of the postwar Nuremberg Trials, where much information about the Holocaust first became public, and where the general history of the genocide was first established.
The actual process of bringing Nazi war criminals to justice was a lengthy and complicated effort involving the differing legal traditions and political agendas of the United States, England, France and the Soviet Union. As the historical record shows, the allied victors, if anything, erred on the side of leniency toward the accused Nazis.
Discussions concerning allied treatment of war criminals had begun as early as October 1943.30 In the summer months following Germany's surrender in 1945, British, American and Soviet representatives met in London to create the charter for an international military tribunal to prosecute "major criminals" whose offenses extended over the entire Reich, and who therefore could be punished by joint decision of the Governments of the Allies.31
By early autumn, the Allies had resolved their debates over whom to prosecute and how to define the crimes committed during the Holocaust; the first trials began thereafter in Nuremberg, before an international military tribunal. The chief defendant was Hermann Goering, but the prosecution also selected 20 other leading officials from the Nazi party, German government ministries, central bureaucracy, armament and labor specialists, the military and territorial chiefs.32
These trials did not result in either "rubber stamp" guilty verdicts or identical sentences. In fact, of the 21 defendants, three were set free; one received a 10-year sentence; one a 15-year sentence; two, 20-year sentences; three, life sentences, and 11 received the death penalty.33
The defendants, moreover, had access to 206 attorneys, 136 of whom had been Nazi party members.34 Furthermore, as Raul Hilberg stated, "The judges in Nuremberg were established American lawyers. They had not come to exonerate or convict. They were impressed with their task, and they approached it with much experience in the law and little anticipation of the facts.35
A second round of trials resulted in 25 death sentences, 20 life sentences, 97 sentences of 25 years or less, and 3 5 not-guilty verdicts.36 By 1951, following the recommendations of an American-run clemency board, 77 of the 142 convicted criminals had been released from prison.37
Notes
1For more information about the National Alliance, see William L. Pierce: Novelist of Hate, ADL Research Report, 1995.
2Israel Gutman (Editor in Chief), Encyclopedia of the Holocaust, Volume 2, New York, 1990, p. 788.
3Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews (Student Edition), New York, 1985, p. 263.
4See Lucy Dawidowicz, The War Against the Jews, 1933-1945, New York, 1975, pp. 150,166.
5Gutman, Volume 2, p. 489.
6Ibid., p. 489.
7Gutman, Volume 2, p. 490.
8Holocaust, Jerusalem: Keter Books, 1974, p. 104.
9Gutman, Volume 2, p. 657.
10Ibid., p. 492.
11Ronnie Duggar, The Texas Observer, Austin, 1992, p. 48.
12Gutman, Volume 2, pp. 641-642.
13Ibid., Volume 2, p. 657.
14Duggar, p. 48.
15Holocaust, pp. 105-106.
16Gutman, Volume 2, p. 453
17Martin Gilbert, The Holocaust, New York, 1985, p. 219.
18Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, Volume 3, New York, 1985, pp. 873-876.
19Gutman, Volume 2, pp. 541-544.
20Gutman, Volume 2, p. 542; Volume 4, pp. 1483, 1486.
21Gutman, Volume 1, pp. 113, 116.
22Holocaust, p. 86.
23Ibid., p. 87.
24Reitlinger, who conducted his research before Hilberg and other scholars, arrives at a more conservative figure of approximately 4.5 murder victims; he nonetheless estimates that one-third of the internees at concentration camps died as a result of starvation, overwork, disease, and other consequences of their captivity. Although his murder count is somewhat lower than that of later scholars, his overall death count remains consistent with subsequent research.
25Dawidowicz, p. 437.
26Hilberg, Vol. 3, p. 1223.
27Dawidowicz, p. 402.
28Peter Hayes, Associate Professor of German History at Northwestern University, states, "after years of studying this matter, I know of no authority who puts the number of Jews killed [emphasis in original] by the Nazis at less than 5.1 or more than 5.9 million men, women and children."
29Dawidowicz, p. 403.
30Hilberg, Vol. 3, p. 1060.
31Hilberg, Vol. 3, p. 1061.
32Hilberg, Vol. 3, p. 1066.
33Hilberg, Vol. 3, p. 1070.
34Hilberg, Vol. 3, p. 1075.
35Hilberg, Vol. 3, p. 1076
36Hilberg, Vol. 3, p. 1077-1078.
37Hilberg, Vol. 3, p. 1079.
YIZKOR
Left and Right - they are the same.
22.12.2006 15:49
The idiot above claiming there is no evidence of the Holocaust should perhaps visit Aushwitz and listen to the testimony of survivors.
Shame on Indymedia
The idiot above
22.12.2006 17:13
The extreme par-illiterates who pollute the indymedia site truly are no better than the supporters of stormfront, the NF or the BNP; the traditional par-illiterates.
The idiot above claiming there is evidence of the Holocaust should perhaps read the words placed above his before jumping to piss poor conclusions.
shame ON indymedia
Christmas greetings from israel - poison and death.
22.12.2006 17:15
Father Olmert
Never forgotten
23.12.2006 21:57
Perhaps you should read the references above.
There is a mountain of evidence about the holocaust - sadly 6,000,000 testimonies will never be heard.
To deny it is to descrate their souls.
Jewish & Proud
the sad part
24.12.2006 01:41
You been had, jackslucid.
Find out how here:
You might want to also take a look at Deborah Lipstadt's book "History on Trial: My Day in Court with David Irving."
gehrig
Oh dear!
24.12.2006 18:00
Why does anyone bother engaging with this troll?
Washington Irving