Holocaust Deniers

Originally posted by Maharbbal People, you seem to forget one thing: the camps weren't the only place were Jews were parked and killed by the Nazi. I mean the ghettos of Lodz and Wasaw in particular were pretty full, and then got totally empty, the people parked there did not disappear into thin air… Similarly, the killing commandos on the Eastern front killed thousands and buried them in such way that now mass graveyard are dug up all over Ukraine. Even if nobody was killed in the camps, the question remains: where did the people from the Yiddishland and Saloniki go to? There were millions of them, they've been killed. We are not investigating a murder in a trial were each case has to be followed step by step. The fact that entire populations disappeared kind of shows that something happened. We may not know how many have been killed, but we pretty much know how many were alive before and not after.

That's generally true for civilians in major wars. But Holocaust is systematic killing, not just missing Jew civilians.

Don't get me wrong, I am not disputing that Holocaut existed, I just say we should not count every missing Jew as a victim of Holocaust. He could have been a victim of typhoid fever or of a shell. So the number of deaths in Holocaust cannot be calculated simply as being the difference between populations before and after the war and it must be derived from other sources.

I would say that perhaps the majority of victims were victims of disease. As was the case with every war till WWII (and that not until the arrival of pencillin).

Originally posted by King John If you die of typhoid in a concentration camp or ghetto that you were forced into that death can be counted as part of the Holocaust since he there is a good chance he would not have contracted the disease had it not been for the forced residence in a concentration camp or ghetto.

Perhaps some Jews fled from persecutions in America and perhaps died there in a car crash, while driving their Chevy I suggest to add these deaths too on the Holocaust, because if they'd live in Poland or Ukraine or Hungary, there was a good chance they wouldn't drive any Chevy.

Chil you are mistaking on the equation. The total number of victims of the Shoah is (very roughly) the total of Jews in Europe in 1939 minus the total of Jews in Europe in 1945 minus the number of Jewish migrants divided by survivability rate of non-Jewish Europeans at the same period (which accounts for the Chevvy accidents).

We have a pretty good idea of the number of migrants to England, Portugal, America and Israel at the time.

This quick issue solved, I don't understand what you mean by  "go and hold somebody guilty for it". Haven't you ever heard of Nuremberg? Besides there are good evidence of their death (if you fancy one day I can send you the testimony of a catholic priest who had my grand father die in his arms in Mathausen), but the definition of it as a 'crime' is problematic as it was ordered by a sovereign government.

Finally, unlike most of you I consider that figure matters. 500 000 dead is not the same as 5 million. The difference is to be found in the fact that it wiped out the map an entire population, a culture, several languages are not spoken any more nowadays because of that (Judeo-Italian, Judeo-Greek and Yiddish have so to speak disappeared).

Finally Vulkan, you are taking the issue of the death toll by the wrong end: we know how many trains arrived in Auschwitz, we know how many survivors there were, so the question is not did they bury 600 000 to 1 million bodies but how did they bury them.

Once more some math: an average human takes 1,8x0,4x0,2=0,144 cubic meters, so in a mass grave of the following dimensions 100x1,8x10 you can pile up 12 500 bodies, it means that 48 such graves would be enough to bury 50% of those who died in the camp assuming that the rest was whether cremated or left to rot. That means that all the victims could have been buried under 12 football fields!

I really don't see what's your problem with the fact that over 5 millions Jews were brutally murdered by the Nazis from 1939 to 1945. The figure (although enormous) is not even that high considering the number of death the war caused (about 10%). The problem here is that you are mistaking criminal justice where instigating even the shadow of a doubt is enough to absolve somebody from a murder and history where the enquiry is not design to punish but to participate to knowledge. We'll never know exactly who killed who and why and exactly in what conditions, but that is not what matters. What is important is to realize that a whole population seemingly disappeared into thin air in a 5 years period.

Chil you are mistaking on the equation. The total number of victims of the Shoah is (very roughly) the total of Jews in Europe in 1939 minus the total of Jews in Europe in 1945 minus the number of Jewish migrants divided by survivability rate of non-Jewish Europeans at the same period (which accounts for the Chevvy accidents). We have a pretty good idea of the number of migrants to England, Portugal, America and Israel at the time. This quick issue solved, I don't understand what you mean by  "go and hold somebody guilty for it". Haven't you ever heard of Nuremberg? Besides there are good evidence of their death (if you fancy one day I can send you the testimony of a catholic priest who had my grand father die in his arms in Mathausen), but the definition of it as a 'crime' is problematic as it was ordered by a sovereign government. Finally, unlike most of you I consider that figure matters. 500 000 dead is not the same as 5 million. The difference is to be found in the fact that it wiped out the map an entire population, a culture, several languages are not spoken any more nowadays because of that (Judeo-Italian, Judeo-Greek and Yiddish have so to speak disappeared).

I agree that not every missing Jew was a victim of the holocaust. Like I said earlier, like most sources I date the beginning of the Holocaust from 1943, and a lot of Jews had been killed one way and another before then, including in concentration camps. But I remember reading when I was about 10 (1943) a book published before the war about the concentration camps and what happened to the people in them because of deliberate ill treatment, including the traing of dogs to attack them.

Edited by gcle2003 - 21-May-2008 at 19:56

These bodies are those recovered by the allies when they liberated the camp evacuated by the Nazis and bulldozed into the grave to avoid epidemics.

Gosh you have a problem with the concept of hypothesis. I never said they were buried, I only demonstrated that it was feasible easily to bury them. Once more we have the number of trains that arrived at Auschwitz, if you assume that they were full, you get the number of people that died there.

In effect, that is on average five trains a week to Auschwitz with about 2 000 people in each train from 1942 to late 1944 (150 weeks). That's 2 000 x 150 x 5 = 1 500 000 people in Auschwitz give or take a margin of error.

At the end, 60 000 prisoners were marched out of the camp to the West and 10 000 were left inside the camp. This is coherent with other forms of calculation (for instance the survival rate of those we know for a fact went to the camps). For instance the 300 children arrested in Paris July 18 1942, only 5 survived…

I don't know what else you need. Besides, you still have the estimated 2 million corps left by the Nazis all over Europe and mostly in the East, to convince you. I have posted a link before but maybe you didn't care to check. These have definitely "lost contact with their friends and family". Your explanation is not relevant as we know how many people emigrated out of continental Europe after the Shoah, and that is way less that those who were murdered by the Nazis.

The fact that the numbers have been inflated doesn't prove anything except that they have been inflated. No 4 million people did not die in Auschwitz as the Soviets claimed, it doesn't mean that 1 million people did not die there.