Holocaust Deniers

The holocaust has long been used as an unquestionable, unapproachable force-field for defending Israeli actions. All one has to do is bring up the holocaust and all critics are silent. Such is the stigma around it that questioning the truth/extent of it is paramount to heresy.

Despite this, there is reasonable grounds to deny the holocaust. While I am not siding either way, to deny legitimate historical investigation is questionable to say the least. The main grounds for questioning are these:

1. The body of evidence is not particularly great.
2. All evidence surfaced after the event.
3. All evidence was produced by nations which had a vested interest in portraying Germany and Hitler as evil.
4. Jewish persons had great motivation for exaggerating claims.

Whilst I personally think it did happen, I also think it's time we get damn well past it. People should be able to question and examine the evidence. No longer should 'we went through the holocaust' be regarded as a legitimate excuse for morally questionable behaviour in the present. Another thing to remember is that, while 6 million jews died in the holocaust, over 30 million slavic persons also did.

1. The body of evidence is not particularly great.

If six million people disappearing within a few years is not a particulary great body of evidence, then what is?

2. All evidence surfaced after the event. 3. All evidence was produced by nations which had a vested interest in portraying Germany and Hitler as evil.

Those points are contradicting each other. If all evidence surfaced after the event, it means it couldn't have been used as anti-German propaganda during the war.

4. Jewish persons had great motivation for exaggerating claims

I'll grant you that, though that fact in itself does not make evidence for the Holocaust any less valid.

Hello to you all

There is actually many independent studies done and I found one that is quite unique to what have I encountered in the past regarding the number of the Jews killed during WWII.

This is pretty long so bear with me:
Source: www.holology.com (author goes by name of Freydis)
Here's is the link of the site: http://www.holology.com/history.html#11
                                                        Holocausts by the Numbers

Although holocaust narratives are interesting studies on their own, the element that intrigues me now is the mechanical aspects of death on a mass scale. Genocidal holocausts are much more difficult than the average person is led to believe – it’s no simple task to make millions of people disappear. How do despotic regimes do it? What logistics elements are really necessary for a mass-extermination campaign?

Two examples of holocausts worth comparing are that of Nazi Germany and the Khmer Rouge’s Cambodia. The Cambodian holocaust is very useful from a historical perspective because it is a recent event and a well documented one as well, but even more importantly it is replete with the physical evidence necessary to validate the numbers attached to the event, namely mountains of bones left behind by the victims of execution. The killing methods employed by the Khmer Rouge were brutally simple consisting of nothing more than rope and plastic bags or an iron bar to the back of the head, and of course starvation by default. Examples of Khmer Rouge killing methods can be found in the 1984 film The Killing Fields, which even though it is not a documentary still does an apt job of depicting life and death under the rule of the Khmer Rouge. Actual interviews of KR prison guards can be found in the documentary film S21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine (2003).

The tools used by the KR thugs may seem primitive and inefficient for mass killing when compared to Nazi gas chambers and crematoria but actually the opposite is true. Mass killings other than war are nearly always done in a very crude fashion. Hutu and Tutsi killed each other in Rwanda using nothing more than machetes during the mass-slaughter of up to one million in 1994.

The simplest and most effective way to kill thousands or even millions of people is, and always has been, famine. Stalin was responsible for a mass starvation that killed a roughly estimated eight million Ukrainians from 1932-1933. Mao Zedong was responsible for several famines that killed millions in China as a direct result of the implementation of his foolish and self-defeating policies such as the ‘Great Leap Forward’ that starved to death an estimated 30 million. [3] Many of the one million Armenians killed by the Turks from 1915-1917 in the “Armenian Holocaust” died from starvation.

The events of the Holocaust of Nazi Germany have been repeated so many times it need not be rehashed in detail.  Jews, criminals and other portions of the German population deemed undesirable by the Nazi regime, such as homosexuals and Jehovah’s Witnesses, were methodically executed by poison gas and then the bodies cremated leaving no traces. In comparison to other historical examples, the Nazi extermination program seems to be the most elaborate mass execution system devised. Nonetheless, just as the KR left mountains of bones, so should the Germans have left behind mountains of ashes from the cremated bodies and bones from the one that weren't. In any case the of volume of physical evidence has to be commensurate with the number of people that died at the extermination sites. Paper evidence and written documentation concerning the Nazi government's plans and procedures for executing millions has also been troublesome for historians because so much of it is either bogus, misleading or simply non-existent. The orders for mass execution are considered to be either hidden or suggested by vague phrases such as solving the 'Jewish problem'.

It seems that the historians that toil to corroborate the Nazi holocaust using period specific documentation are left to assume that little or no written record was left by intent in order to cover up the crime. This would not be without precedent as Stalin was notorious for using verbal orders to liquidate opponents rather than written records that could be traced back to him personally. So as far as Nazi Germany is concerned events imply that Hitler spoke about the ‘Jewish Problem’ and his deputies took it up on their own to interpret a solution to that ‘problem’, i.e. mass execution by poison gas in special extermination camps. It must also be added here that much of the evidence to support the Nazi Holocaust comes from dubious and highly suspect sources. The Soviets ‘discovered’ and concocted bogus evidence on numerous Nazi crimes because they had a strong ideological motivation to make the Germans look as evil and inhuman as possible. Anything that made Hitler seem more ghastly only made Stalin look less insidious himself in comparison. The Katyn Forest Massacre is a classic example of this Soviet policy, they blamed their killings on the Nazis and lied about their own crime all the way up to 1990. But the point here is that regardless of the validity of documents and stories, take them or leave them, certain numerical facts remain and that is where we really begin.

Now for some mathematical comparisons. The Khmer Rouges officially took power in Cambodia on April 17, 1975 and their regime lasted three years eight months and 22 days. The Khmer Rouge killed around 1.5 million Cambodians during their reign. Starting with the basic assumption that the Khmer Rouge could only be killing while they were in power, this gives us a fixed time period with which to calculate the rate of killing. Here’s the math: 

In actuality most of the 1.5 million killed by the KR were the result of starvation not intentional execution. True executions by the KR may be as few as 50,000. [4] Recalculating based on this lower limit generates a significantly less dramatic result:

So, we can see that although the KR were busy killing Cambodians the numbers are what we would expect to be practical and possible given the methods used and the established time frame.

Since Germany was an open country and since the extermination camps were a factor of wartime, the mass killings associated with Nazi Germany occurred during the war years of WWII, in this case the fall of 1939 until spring of 1945 or about five and a half years. The total number killed in Nazi extermination camps varies widely. The most common number thrown about is six million but that only refers to the number of Jews killed. Including everyone else Nazi Germany supposedly executed in the Holocaust bumps the number up to somewhere between 11 million and an incredible 26 million. [1] This vast discrepancy makes calculations more difficult so we'll run two examples, one for the lowest number of six million and one for the highest number of 26.

Establishing the time frame in this case is a choice between greater accuracy according to the given set of events and providing an intentionally exaggerated allowance to cover every possible act. An exaggerated allowance would use the fall of 1939 until the spring of 1945, the entire length of the war, as the time frame. However, this time frame would be misleading because the killing of the millions in the Holocaust occurred at the Nazi execution camps that only operated from around early 1942 until mid 1944. For greater accuracy I’ll use the time frame from the beginning of 1942 until the middle of 1944, or 30 months. Here’s the math:

Clearly the Nazis were killing people at a frenetic rate the Khmer Rouge could only have aspired towards, as even on the smallest total number, the Nazis out-killed the KR by eleven times on the daily average! This is especially peculiar because it occurred during the largest and most expensive (and expansive) hot war in human history. So even though the KR had only internal issues to deal with and no external war to fight at the same time, the Nazis managed to fight a two front war against three major enemies and still exterminate several hundred people every day for nearly three years, and that's just an average!

Another aspect of the Nazi liquidation machine that demands further investigation is that of cremation. Complete cremation of bodies is a very energy intensive operation and even so it still leaves a few pounds of ash and bone fragments per person, 5% of the body. [2] So multiply that five pounds minimum (100lb body*.05 = 5 lbs) by the number of people cremated:

That’s a hell of a lot of ash. So where is it all of it? Since the Nazi extermination camps are in Poland, the first place to look for these massive quantities of human ash is, logically, at one of these camps: Auschwitz, Belzec, Chelmno, Majdanek, Sobibór, and Treblinka, but more on that in a moment. It should also be mentioned here that these extermination camps were discovered and controlled by the Communist Russian Soviet forces as they rolled west towards Berlin during the final phase of World War II.

Another technical problem also exists, the time limit, for it takes at least two hours to cremate one body in a special, modern oven at a constant temperature between 760 to 1150 °C (1400 to 2100 °F). [2] Old cremation ovens would have taken longer, five to ten hours per body, especially if they were fueled by less efficient means than a gas like propane.

These cremation ovens would have to be running constantly for nearly three years in order to destroy the bodies of the number of people Nazi Germany is supposed to have liquidated. However, this assumes that only one body was cremated at a time. If you build a bigger oven then you can logically burn up more bodies in any given time period. A photo of the Majdanek crematorium reveals that it is not designed for more than one body at a time in a given section but it does have what appear to be five chambers. Mathausen appears to only have one oven with two single body chambers. Other sites were destroyed but it is reasonable to expect the cremation ovens would be of similar sizes.

Another technical problem is fuel for the ovens. Could wartime Germany afford the fuel needed to constantly run 2,380 cremation ovens for nearly three years? Cremation ovens need very high temperatures to operate and this requires a constant, energetic fuel supply like natural gas. These fuels were in very short supply because of the war effort. If the Nazis used coal, as is assumed, they would have needed mountains of the stuff and an entire army to continually shovel it into the furnaces.

Even more waste product would have been produced from the consumed coal in the form of ash. Given the scale of the purported operation, the burned coal fuel for the crematoria would have been piled into giant heaps something like the waste from a simple coal-fired power plant.

The Execution Camps

Now let's attempt to break it down by extermination camp to see if the figures make more sense that way. A more specific study of each site reveals the approximate dates of  actual operation, a significantly shorter window than the entire war period, meaning that the executions must have occurred at a much more rapid pace than calculated above. It also reveals that most of the dead were not cremated!

Auschwitz II (Birkenau)

“Large-scale extermination started in Spring 1942. ... Between May and July 1944, about 438,000 Jews from Hungary were deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau and the majority were killed there.” [10] Like Birkenau, Majdanek was also overrun by the Soviets. 

Belzec

“The installation was finished by early March 1942. … by December 1942, the last shipment of Jews arrived in Belzec. ... 434,508 Jews were killed in Belzec ... [T]he corpses were buried in pits covered with only a narrow layer of earth.” [5] Thus since none of the victims at Belzec were cremated (according to this story) it should be a straightforward, even if time consuming, matter to exhume the bones and officially number the dead.

Chelmno

“The death camp operated from December 8, 1941 until April 1943 when it was closed down and its crematorium blown up, ... It is estimated that 200,000 people were killed in the camp” [9]

Majdanek

Majdanek is the showcase operation because it contains all the primary elements of the execution machinery and is considered to be the best preserved execution camp. “Between April 1942 and July 1944, extermination took place in Majdanek using gas chambers and crematoria. ... It is estimated that over 235,000 human lives were lost in Majdanek,” [8] Majdanek has a monument with ashes that are claimed to be human and there’s a convincing amount. It should also be noted that Majdanek was discovered, liberated, acquired, however you want to put it, by the Soviets. So, if Majdanek was a crime scene then the Soviets are about the least reputable investigator that could possibly be put in control of it.

Maly Trostenets

Maly Trostenets near Minsk. “No survivors of the camp are known to exist, and estimates of the number of people killed there range from 200,000 to more than half a million. ... the camp became a Vernichtungsl*ger, or extermination camp, on May 10, 1942 when the first transport of Jews arrived there.” [11] Maly Trostenets ended in June 1944 when the advancing Soviet forces took over. Crematoria are not mentioned, implying yet another simple dump-the-bodies-in-a-grave execution operation.

Sobibór

“At least 180,000 people were killed in Sobibór.” [6] Cremation is not mentioned so it is possible to count the bones to determine the number of dead.

Treblinka

“It was operated from July 1942 until October 1943 … approximately 310,000 Jews were transported in freight trains from the Warsaw Ghetto to Treblinka during the period from July 22, 1942 to October 3, 1942." [7] Yet the total is always shown as being much more. Nearly every source gives a different total number killed from 700,000 to 1,400,000 at Treblinka because the records are either non-existent or were destroyed. The story of Treblinka has the bodies being buried in mass graves. So to determine the number dead at Treblinka one should look to count bones not ash volume.

Total killed for each execution camp are as follows: Auschwitz II: 1,100,000; Belzec: 436,000; Chelmno: 340,000; Majdanek: 300,000 to 350,000; Sobibór: 260,000; Treblinka: at least 700,000, possibly over 1,000,000; Maly Trostenets: at least 200,000, possibly over 500,000. [12] Giving a maximum total of 3,986,000 and that includes Jews and everyone else. The estimated total dead for these major execution camps is still significantly less than total of six million Jews and not even close to the upper limit of 26 million. What about the rest? “Before Operation Reinhard, over a million Jews were killed by the Einsatzgruppen, mobile SS units whose sole purpose was to murder Jews and commissars in territories conquered by the German army.” [7] So someone in some capacity as an expert roughly estimates that another one million were killed and their bodies left scattered around Europe. 4,986,000.

The point I’m trying to make is that there’s no way to make any of these numbers credible within the parameters of the given narrative that characterizes the Nazi Holocaust story; it’s a classic example of atrocity inflation. And until an objective, professional and complete forensic examination is conducted it will never be anything more than a claim based on speculation, rumor, interrogations under duress, ridiculously biased sources and estimations of estimated estimates. How difficult is it to forge a document? How difficult is it to get the public to believe the validity of that document if it lends support to the execution stories in the Nazi Holocaust? No, the majority of the real definitive proof hasn’t even been cremated, it’s still in the ground.

What really happened?

The logistics requirements for the Nazi extermination machine would make it impossible to keep the operation a secret or even moderately covert simply given the energy and manpower requirements needed to maintain and operate it. The smoke and fumes alone would have been an indicator for miles around.

So what are we left with? If we take the given numbers executed by the Nazis and factor in the absolute limitations of time and make plenty of allowance for resources that they likely didn't even have, then something just does not compute. The physical infrastructure is simply not present to support a mass execution on the purported scale and within the purported means. The truth must be much less insidious than the myth, at least on a numerical scale anyway. Just ask yourself, can the known events be explained without the application of the elaborate Nazi Holocaust story? Yes they can!

Tolerance for dissent is always at a nadir during a war in any society and the Germans were no exception. The Nazi government rounded up dissenters, troublemakers, and potential problems, most of them non-Germans, and shipped them off to labor and concentration camps. But it made no sense to simply setup a massive mechanism to exterminate millions of these people that would place an enormous drain on manpower and resources when the Germans could instead turn the imprisoned into a cheap labor force that would actually aid the war effort instead of making it more difficult. And that’s what they did. Germany was very pressed for resources even when the war was going in their favor, but especially so towards the end. The Nazi government, typically German in efficiency, ranked and allocated their limited resources according to the needs of the German nation. Germans came first and non-Germans last. So while the German cities and factories were being bombed into rubble by the British and Americans and the German people were running low on food and everything else, the people in the concentration camps were only getting the barest minimum of food and supplies, if even that. Hence the emaciated and diseased victims found at the end of the war and widely filmed for propaganda value.

The “gas chambers” in the “extermination camps” were exactly what they looked like and were originally designed for: to fumigate and sterilize clothing and other articles to prevent the spread of insects and disease, always a problem in any cramped quarters but especially so in a concentration camp. Just looking at the pictures of these crematoria, claims of 6, 11 or even 26 million bodies burned up in these ovens is nothing short of outrageous. This does not mean that people were not executed, but claims of millions killed by the Nazis in extermination camps are wildly inflated, far beyond the level of absurdity. In fact these claims are so fantastic that very few people are willing to question them precisely because they are so incredible but at the same time supported by the apparent credibility of time and authority!

Which version makes more sense?

Even if people were missing this does not prove or even imply that they were murdered. The years before, during and after World War II featured a massive demographic turmoil caused by multiple factors. Indeed it was the largest movement of people in world history! If contact with a relative or friend was lost during this upheaval it should hardly be surprising. Yet practically every Jew who experienced this loss assumes by default that their loss was due to a Nazi murder. Think about it, if one million Haim, Hannah and Hershel’s all lost contact with each other then we have an instant ‘Holocaust’ of six million Jews. Not only that, but after the war half of Europe was cut off from the rest behind the "iron curtain" of strict Soviet control. Separated friends and relatives lived and died on opposite sides of Cold War Europe without ever reconnecting.

Another way of putting it is to always choose the solution that requires the least amount of credulousness. So which one do you choose?

A) Many Jews lost contact with many of their friends and relatives and assumed they died amongst the greatest turmoil and movement of persons in world history. 

- or -

B) Jews from all over Europe were systematically identified, arrested, and packed onto trains by a country that was being attacked from all sides during the largest war in human history. These people were sent to half a dozen camps in Poland that were constructed for no other purpose than to execute the inhabitants yet still disguised so that no one would figure out what was really going on. These Jews were abused, tortured, enslaved and executed, waves of them lured into shower rooms then poisoned with a gas that the German guards bought at their local hardware store. Other Jews hauled out the dead bodies to be burned in pits, buried in shallow graves or incinerated to the sum total of somewhere between 6 and 26 million. Then, after the war was over and the execution system was discovered by the sworn enemies of the Nazi party, the key evidential elements necessary for confirmation were found to be either missing or destroyed.

So which version do you swallow?

Can the truth be found?

No effort was ever made to verify personal claims of the numbers executed with the physical remains after the execution camps were liberated, and that is exactly why the crematoria entered the story because it is the only way to rectify the purported numbers executed with the totally inadequate volume of physical evidence present in the form of human ash and bones. So if the given numbers are wildly inflated then is there really any way to definitively gauge the true number of people executed by the Nazis in extermination camps? The number killed? Yes. The number executed? Only to the extent that it cannot be more than the number of dead. Assuming that all the remains from the people executed did not leave the site of the camp, or if they did, that we know where they went to, then determining the cause of death is still a problematic endeavor but determining number of deaths is not. Where there is ash we can estimate number of people that died based on the volume and chemical composition. Where there are bones we can count the number of bodies, one skull means one person, and often determine the cause of death such as disease or violence.

Exactly this necessary verification process is conducted today in the case of a massacre, genocide or war crime. One reason is because the victim group, race, or tribe will exaggerate the numbers killed. Another reason is that in order to build a valid case, and one that is legally prosecutable, the facts have to be established beyond a reasonable doubt. This means exhuming the bodies and human remains and carefully cataloging what is found, where it’s found and the approximate date the bodies were buried. This process has to be openly documented and conducted by impartial professionals.

For an example of this procedure simply travel a few hundred miles south of Poland, where fifty years after the end of World War II, up to 8,000 Bosnian males were killed in what is referred to as the Srebrenica massacre. This mass killing has been called a genocide because of the ethnic motivation behind it. Forensic investigators are currently excavating the human remains from multiple sites in order to catalog the executions and prosecute those responsible.

Do the total murder numbers really matter?

Imagine what would happen if authorities claimed for 50 years that Serbs had killed six million Bosnian Muslims, never having conducted any objective forensic investigation, when the Serbs really didn’t kill more than 8,000? And not only that but the authorities making the exaggerated allegations were all enemies or opponents of the accused Serbs, having every reason to lie about the facts, obscure the truth and prevent a fair investigation? Yes, the numbers definitely do matter.

Comparative Analysis

Despite the variation in time and geography, mass-killings all have certain core similarities that make comparison and analysis a fairly straightforward, even if macabre, study. There’s no fundamental ambiguity about the event, no lingering questions about the main cause of death and the numbers have a fixed range that is capable of being linked back to physical evidence. But in the case of the Nazi Holocaust there’s something very peculiar. No other mass killing is as clouded by contradictory statements and startlingly different narratives while being as intensely polarized. The Nazi Holocaust has more layers than an onion and stings the eyes even worse.

Mass killings are ugly but straightforward affairs and the cause of death is rarely in dispute whether it be an artificial famine, thousands of angry machetes or a metal bar to the skull. But not with the Nazi Holocaust, in some cases it is poison gas, in another it is a bullet, in another it is torture, in another it is dynamite, literally every form of killing imaginable has been ascribed to a Nazi execution. Nor are the total numbers killed so violently dispersed across the spectrum in other mass killings because they always leave behind human remains that can be used to measure the scale of the atrocity. Yet in the case of the Nazi Holocaust the story continually grows to exclude the possibility of verification. So when bones are needed they become ash from an incinerator and where the ash should be found it has been obliterated. Where a gas chamber or cremation oven should be found it has been bombed or dismantled. Where objective, independent analysis should be employed to determine fact from fiction, we have personal attacks and a paucity of forensic studies.

The Nazi Holocaust is unique in the immunity to questions and criticism that is has acquired, a remarkable allowance that has never been granted to any other recorded event of mass killing. As the ‘Shoah’ it has achieved a level of mythical, mystical sanctity that cannot be questioned, critiqued or evaluated in any objective or critical context as one would with any other historical event. This is something so profoundly unnatural and antithetic to modern, progressive thought it can only be described as a contemporary taboo or religious dogma. Even the law of gravity is open to debate and criticism from anyone that can come up with an explanation that better describes it than the one we have now. No one feels insulted or attacked if traditional concepts of gravity are challenged because, in any open debate, ideas and theories are allowed to stand or fall based on their own internal merit. Yet this is curiously not the case with the Nazi Holocaust story, for some insecure and fearful European countries actually imprison people that question it!

Indeed the historical and personal obsession with Nazi crimes borders on the irrational; any library will have shelves full of books written on Hitler, the Nazis, and especially the (Nazi) Holocaust. How many books fill a typical library on the Armenian Holocaust or the Ukrainian ‘Holodomor’? In any objective context the 20^th century was a violent, brutal and bloody century but the Nazis had no monopoly on killing in practice, desire or even methodology. Even the purported numbers exterminated by the Nazis remain smaller than the crimes of Mao and Stalin, both of which were Communists, interestingly enough.

Mass killings have occurred before the Nazi era and they have occurred after it, it’s not an impossibility. Regardless of what I know some readers are going to assume, I don’t have a stake in this issue one way or the other and I’m not trying to force one set of facts to fit a predetermined bias. If you know of something I'm missing then document it, list the reference, and send it to me. If the Nazis really did liquidate 26 million people in execution camps then let's see the evidence, because an event on that scale will present it unambiguously. But if the Nazis really only killed a few hundred thousand and the lie of millions is still being perpetuated over fifty years later, then something is seriously wrong here.

We should remember that truth is the first casualty in war. Not only that but the winners write the history books, and making Nazi Germany look as evil as possible was of critical importance to the Soviets, the Americans and the British too. Not only because they needed to justify their war in the minds of the public but also to deflect against outrageous wartime atrocities of their own. The British and Americans intentionally targeted civilian population centers in Germany and Japan with massive fire-bombing attacks that killed thousands upon thousands of innocent people, cremated you might even say, as a result. 11.08.05

This is a highly controversial (and regrettably in some countries; illegal) topic. A discussion on it is welcome. Use of it for nefarious, racist and vicious ideologys, of whatever stripe is not.

To answer the salient points raised in the link.

Ulrich, better to discuss these things. Res ipsa liqator, the thing speaks for itself. You do not have to say how evil it is, it is obvious even from a dispassionate review of the subject matter.

Originally posted by ulrich von hutten Once again these forum is used to spread out this crap.   This listings of numbers, relativizing of facts and diversifying of evidence makes me sick.

Which are all basic criteria for objectively studying an event. Facts, numbers and diverse evidence....

So are we discounting the stories of survivors as well? Because clearly they can't objectively tell about their experiences. What about the people who say their family members/friends executed or saw them go into the gas chambers and never come out. What about the pictures and stories of liberating soldiers who tell of getting to camps and seeing piles of dead bodies? Surely this carries weight? Or were these claims exaggerated as well?

Originally posted by Sparten Ulrich, better to discuss these things. Res ipsa liqator, the thing speaks for itself.