Were We Told the Truth about World War 2?

[ProfWag]

[FatFreddy]

[ProfWag]

[SydneyPSIder]

[T]he Holocaust denial movement bases its approach on the predetermined idea that the Holocaust, as understood by mainstream historiography, did not occur.[8] Sometimes referred to as "negationism", from the French term négationnisme introduced by Henry Rousso,[14] Holocaust deniers attempt to rewrite history by minimizing, denying or simply ignoring essential facts. Koenraad Elst writes:

Negationism means the denial of historical crimes against humanity. It is not a reinterpretation of known facts, but the denial of known facts. The term negationism has gained currency as the name of a movement to deny a specific crime against humanity, the Nazi genocide on the Jews in 1941–45, also known as the holocaust (Greek: complete burning) or the Shoah (Hebrew: disaster). Negationism is mostly identified with the effort at re-writing history in such a way that the fact of the Holocaust is omitted.[15]

Attempts at concealment by perpetrators

See also: Sonderaktion 1005 and Posen speeches

Members of a Sonderkommando 1005 unit pose next to a bone-crushing machine in the Janowska concentration camp in occupied Poland (Jun 1943 – Oct 1943)

April 12, 1945: Generals Eisenhower, OhNo Bradley and George S. Patton inspect, at Ohrdruf forced labor camp, an improvised crematory pyre

Historians have documented evidence that as Germany's defeat became imminent and the Nazi leaders realized they would most likely be captured and brought to trial, great effort was made to destroy all evidence of mass extermination. Heinrich Himmler instructed his camp commandants to destroy records, crematoria, and other signs of mass extermination.[16] As one of many examples, the bodies of the 25,000 mostly Latvian Jews whom Friedrich Jeckeln and the soldiers under his command had shot at Rumbula (near Riga) in late 1941 were dug up and burned in 1943.[17] Similar operations were undertaken at Belzec, Treblinka and other death camps.[16] In the infamous Posen speeches of October 1943 such as the one on October 4, Himmler explicitly referred to the murder of the Jews of Europe and further stated that the murder must be permanently kept secret:

I also want to refer here very frankly to a very difficult matter. We can now very openly talk about this among ourselves, and yet we will never discuss this publicly. Just as we did not hesitate on June 30, 1934, to perform our duty as ordered and put comrades who had failed up against the wall and execute them, we also never spoke about it, nor will we ever speak about it. Let us thank God that we had within us enough self-evident fortitude never to discuss it among us, and we never talked about it. Every one of us was horrified, and yet every one clearly understood that we would do it next time, when the order is given and when it becomes necessary.

I am now referring to the evacuation of the Jews, to the extermination of the Jewish people.[18]

In 1945, General Dwight D. Eisenhower, Supreme Allied Commander, anticipated that someday an attempt would be made to recharacterize the Nazi crimes as propaganda and took steps against it:

The same day[19] I saw my first horror camp. It was near the town of Gotha. I have never been able to describe my emotional reactions when I first came face to face with indisputable evidence of Nazi brutality and ruthless disregard of every shred of decency. Up to that time I had known about it only generally or through secondary sources. I am certain however, that I have never at any time experienced an equal sense of shock.

I visited every nook and cranny of the camp because I felt it my duty to be in a position from then on to testify at first hand about these things in case there ever grew up at home the belief or assumption that "the stories of Nazi brutality were just propaganda". Some members of the visiting party were unable to go through with the ordeal. I not only did so but as soon as I returned to Patton's headquarters that evening I sent communications to both Washington and London, urging the two governments to send instantly to Germany a random group of newspaper editors and representative groups from the national legislatures. I felt that the evidence should be immediately placed before the American and the British publics in a fashion that would leave no room for cynical doubt.[20]

Eisenhower, upon finding the victims of the death camps, ordered all possible photographs to be taken, and for the German people from surrounding villages to be ushered through the camps and even made to bury the dead. He wrote the following to General Marshall after visiting a German internment camp near Gotha, Germany:

The visual evidence and the verbal testimony of starvation, cruelty and bestiality were so overpowering as to leave me a bit sick. In one room, where they [there] were piled up twenty or thirty naked men, killed by starvation, George Patton would not even enter. He said that he would get sick if he did so. I made the visit deliberately, in order to be in a position to give first-hand evidence of these things if ever, in the future, there develops a tendency to charge these allegations merely to "propaganda."[21]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocaust_denial

[FatFreddy]

The Above doesn't make this go away.

"Robert Faurisson: The Problem Of Gas Chambers - (Le Probleme Des Chambres a Gaz)."
http://www.youtube.com/results?search_q ... %22+&sm=12

The Dachau Gas Chamber
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M4nY6T46aGA#t=1474

Auschwitz - Why The Gas Chambers Are A Myth
http://www.youtube.com/results?search_q ... Myth&sm=12

ONE THIRD of the HOLOCAUST
http://www.youtube.com/results?search_q ... UST+&sm=12


I might as well just post stuff that I find to share with the viewers. Here's some more.

The Holocaust Unveiled
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p2g7ydp9 ... 75F767A878

I haven't had time to watch the first one on the list. I've only looked at a few of the short ones. They looked pretty good.

[ProfWag]

[SydneyPSIder]

OK, I've reviewed some of the many youtubes posted by FF with very little explanation -- apparently asking everyone to watch numerous 30 min - 2 hr videos substitutes for making any kind of cogent argument.

There are some good points about the design and feasibility of alleged large scale gassing and cremation operations, for instance. FF has done a particularly poor job of mounting any argument or making any point whatsoever, he just continually posts very long youtube video links and demands everyone watch them end to end.

However, it might be possible to adduce the following ideas from FF's posts as a kind of synthesis of what we reasonably know from photos etc vs what we might have been told to believe:

- Nazi concentration camps seem like pretty awful places, and they were designed to hold ppl they didn't like -- POWs, other ethnicities and races, and particularly Jewish ppl. Ppl in the camps were used as labour in nearby factories for the war effort, and so on. It's possible the crematorium facilities were simply used to dispose of camp mortalities from illness, based on the size of the facilities, some facilities were used for pest control, and so on. It appears the Allied claims of throughput may just not have been possible.

- Hitler had particularly targeted Jewish ppl in his writings in Mein Kampf, and in his treatment of Jewish ppl right through the 1930s when he gained power. a form of ethnic cleansing was proposed throughout via a long series of harassments.

- this then calls into question the size of the Holocaust itself, without disputing that the Nazis (in a spirit common in much of Europe at the time) had decided to place various groups into concentration camps, including POWs.

- we are left to wonder then what 'the final solution' might be, if it were not mass extermination. Mass deportation, perhaps? Mass deportations definitely also occurred over borders of neighbouring countries.

- David Irving makes a case against Churchill and others in terms of superpower rivalry and individuals' own financial positions in terms of how the war was started, prosecuted and 'sold'. Regardless of the fact that Neville Chamberlain actually prosecuted the war first as PM, and that there had been rumblings all the way through the 1930s, appeasement, rearmament, and so on.

- various postings of Hitler's speeches suggest that Hitler was only interested in re-uniting German speaking ppls for their own good, and to act as a barrier against Russia. The Allies have characterised this as a ploy where world or European domination was really the main aim, derived from Prussian delusions of grandeur and Hitler's own megalomania. Certainly a completely re-united Germany consisting of Austria and parts of Czechoslovakia and Poland would have had a considerable impact in enlarging an already large superpower to over 80 million ppl, a lot of ppl at that time -- e.g. the popn of the US in 1939 was 131M ppl, Russia 170M ppl, not including territories, France 50M, UK 46.5M. Certainly a large, organised, determined, militaristic country of over 80M ppl would give immediately surrounding countries cause for concern.

- why would Hitler need to raise an army of 7M ppl and spend a fortune on weapons development just to gain a small concession in Poland? including U-boats to sink shipping in the Atlantic, tens of thousands of planes, infantry and guns, etc etc. Of course the terms of the Treaty of Versailles after WWI prevented the Germans from raising a large standing army, the Prussians had a history of militarism, and so on.

- we are being asked to believe that Hitler 'having' to invade Poland, Belgium, France and then go on to try to take England, was just an unfortunate escalation of his desire to reunify a couple of minor German speaking areas surrounding Germany, and that being thwarted in that aim he had little choice but to declare total war on everyone who wasn't fascist at the time, including exhausting the entire population of Germany in brutal warfare if required, and that clearly there was no other diplomatic option open to him nor were negotiations possible -- despite several attempts at coups by senior officers hoping to indicate that the Nazis were a group separate from the rest of the German population who could rebel against them and form a new govt, such as the famous Claus von Stauffenberg attempt.

- the counter-proposal to the above was that Hitler and the Nazis were extremely cunning, chess masters in politics, and had successfully concocted ways of annexing territories without having to go to war up until Poland. however, by the time they wanted to annexe parts of Poland, they were facing threats of war from surrounding superpowers, the violation of the agreement of Munich, and so on -- but they didn't believe the other superpowers had an appetite for war, that they would fold and wimp out at the last minute if they kept encroaching on other countries -- their excuses and pretexts would continue to work.

- that as the German war effort ran out of resources in 1945, concentration camp members were progressively starved as scarce resources went to others leading to the pictures that we see at the end of the war.

Questions for further research:

- how many of the German troops and POWs etc in the camp deny mass extermination efforts involving gassing and cremation or any other method took place? Credible witnesses?

- what of the 'Lebensraum' discourse? Just how much room did the Nazis think they needed? What was the aim of this discourse? Did they want to annexe further territories to the west or east?

- what of the 'final solution' rhetoric? what did it mean?

Points to ponder:

- against this we have the fascist system of govt as a rather unattractive manifestation of capitalism and totalitarianism. the 'ein volk, ein fueher' type slogans really point to the notion of believing in a benevolent dictatorship, involving also big business, over any notion of individual agency and democracy = the right to participate in decision-making. probably not a good way to go. as Churchill pointed out, "democracy is the worst form of government, except all the others that have been tried".

- the fanatical goose stepping and heil hitlering and stiff saluting and apparent dedication to purpose would scare any other superpower.

- the invasion of Czechoslovakia and particularly the manipulation of Slovakia seem highly questionable. The Nazis had no compunctions about enslaving the people of their new territories and conscripting them into the Nazi project. These actions, along with the next step, annexing parts of Poland, would be enough for any other League of Nations cluster to want to stop the Nazis at that point in terms of violation of international law around sovereign territories etc.

- of course if Hitler was genuinely only concerned about attacks from Russia from the east, there are other ways he could have handled it responsibly and diplomatically. although Germany was oppressed by the terms of reparation particularly from France, they could have negotiated with the other western European superpowers as a kind of horse trade, swapping operating as a kind of dam against communism for their reparation debt, but controlling the level of rearmament, co-operating with Britain and France in stationing troops in the east of the country, and so on. To take the path Hitler took was completely unnecessary. Further, it does not seem any such negotiations or policy formulation was entered into, it was just German reunification, fascism, payback against France, and so on, which seems like an attempt at world domination to me. further, the Germans realised they would have to seize valuable oil assets in the middle east and north Africa and so on, triggering the desert war in north Africa and an attempt to obtain middle eastern assets.


So given the Socratic thesis (largely unstated by FF, left to infer) + anti-thesis (victors' account of events) = synthesis, while I don't accept that Hitler was just trying to re-unify Germany, altruistically head off the Russian threat to Europe, and get on with his life, and that instead he victimised ethnic minorities, had an insane Aryan supremacy ideology, conducted a large number of false flag exercises, was a master of propaganda and misleading the ppl of Germany, and ran cruel and vicious concentration camps, it is possible the Holocaust did not place as it is often presented -- that 6M did not die, although certainly many hundreds of thousands were rounded up and put into concentration camps and treated extremely badly, often individually to the point of death, and that this occurred in every territory the Germans invaded.

FF seems to be making the further case, a la David Irving, that in fact Britain and in particular Winston Churchill, had reasons to start a war by provocation and diplomatic maneuvering that Germany had no intention of getting into, in other words, fascist Germany was innocent, and the Allies were guilty -- of something. Whereas the ethic cleansing and scapegoating and annexing and violations of human rights of the Nazis was perfectly OK.

Is FF likely to actually take up the questions above and explain further? Or just post more links to vids?

Is this thread supposed to be some sort of test of scepticism vs pseudoscepticism, by the way? Or a test in comprehension in fathoming FF's cryptic posts?

[FatFreddy]

[Misha]

[ProfWag]

[ProfWag]

[SydneyPSIder]

[SydneyPSIder]

[SydneyPSIder]

[ProfWag]