That first thing that changed your mind

[david2923]

Go back to the time when you believed the narrative about the holocaust.
Now, ask yourself this question. What was "the thing" you learned that began to change your mind about the official narrative. What was that "Wait a minute" tid bit that got you thinking?

I will start it off:
For me, it was watching Cole and Zundel discussing the Auschwitz swimming pool at the pool on video. The rest of the video, I could not take my eyes off it. From this time on, I have been in this rabbit hole. I am not even sure why I clicked on it.

[Lamprecht]

For me it was a very long time ago, I was still a teenager. But one of the big things was the piles of bodies. They always show you the photographs of the piles of bodies and say stuff like

Holocaust deniers say this didn't happen, that these pictures are staged. These people were murdered in a systematic extermination policy!

But the truth was that these piles of bodies were victims of disease and starvation in the final moments of the war. If it all really happened as they say, why do they need to deceptively use photographs and point to disease victims and say they were exterminated?
Even major figures in the US and British military stated that these people died of disease and lack of food because Germany was crumbling.

More on that subject here:

SS Officer Karl von Eberstein on the conditions of the camps / Piles of bodies & Emaciated Corpses
viewtopic.php?t=12624

[PrudentRegret]

For me it was Eric Hunt's film on Majdanek that had the biggest impact in "changing my mind"....

https://www.bitchute.com/video/5x9Md2KMNRFC/

So the Soviets conquered Majdanek in July of 1944 and then lied on a massive scale about German atrocities, including 2 million murders and seven gas chambers, which are now admitted to have been complete lies...

And then the Soviets rolled into Auschwitz in Jan 1945 and made basically the exact same claims, and we are supposed to believe them? I found that hard to accept, and researching the issue further only made me less confident in the Holocaust narrative.



The first time I ever engaged in revisionism was less than a year ago: viewtopic.php?f=2&t=12898&p=94793#p94793

I've learned a lot since then. The more I learn, the less confidence I have in the Official Narrative.

Arguing with the HolocaustControversies folks demolished any remaining belief I had in the narrative. They are liars promoting a political agenda and don't care about the historical truth. If they are the "best" the Holocaust narrative has to offer, then the Holocaust narrative is truly bankrupt.

I'm also like you- I don't even remember why I watched my first revisionist film (which was Rudolf's Chemistry of Auschwitz). Just wanted some background noise and laughs while I did other things. But I was surprised by how scholarly and persuasive it was. It's easy to see why censorship is such an important tool for maintaining the Holocaust narrative.

[Hannover]

I remember having a discussion as a kid with a friend long before what we now recognize as 'holocaust revisionism'.
I said to my friend, after he mentioned the alleged treatment of Jews by the 'Nazis' which wasn't even called the "holocaust" back then (like I said, a long time ago). So I said something like, 'But there are no millions corpses to see which would support such wild claims, have you ever seen them? I haven't. Be real, Jews would surely have excavations showing them plastered all over the place.'
And to this day we still see no such human remains in what are claimed to be in known locations.

And many, many years after the matter had pretty much slipped from my consciousness, it was the Ernst Zundel news stories, finding CODOH, and then John Ball's book of war time aerial photos which further exposed the fraud to me.

From there it was just a simple matter of doing the most basic of research into more details.
It really is too easy, and that's why free speech on the subject is banned and suppressed.

- Hannover

[Carto's Cutlass Supreme]

The 4 mil sign at Auschwitz as compared to the 1.5 mil sign, as seen on "Birdman Bryant's" (RIP) site! Sometime in the mid or late 90's. Then as Hannover said, 'the matter had pretty much slipped from my consciousness' till later.

[borjastick]

For me my interest had already become aroused about 20 years ago but as I started to read about the holocaust and 'industrialised murder machine' I grew very suspicious of the numbers claimed. For instance I read that the Germans were murdering up to 20,000 jews a day in Auschwitz which I thought was just ridiculous and not credible. That was when the bells began to ring in my head that this was fantasy, lies, massive deceit.

I couldn't understand how they would get rid of the bodies of 20,000 people every day. Just where would these corpses go or how would they cremate all those people every day? It's one big lie.

[Doggy]

I remember using a calculator when I was about 12 when we learning about it in school to work out how many would've had to have died over the course of 4 years for the 11 million figure to be reached. I felt it was impractical but I never gave it much thought until years later. Even when I accepted that I didn't think the official narrative was true I never gave much thought to it beyond reading some of those generic infographics. Recently became interested in researching specifics so here I am.

[Archie]

What made me first look into it: It was about five years ago. I heard there was a Jewish guy who didn't believe in the Holocaust (David Cole). Looked him up. Watched the Donahue episode (Denierbud version although I didn't know who it was at the time). The "crazy" holocaust deniers came on and they were surprisingly objective and were making very reasonable points. But even more telling was that I waited to hear the counter-arguments and ... nothing. Nada. They had Michael Shermer on the other side and the man brought absolutely nothing. This was stunning to me. Why couldn't they get a top historian to come on the show and rip the revisionists to shreds? Why are they ducking these guys??? Nor was I very impressed with the survivors they had on since it seemed obvious to me that this was an attempt to substitute emotion for evidence in what should be a historical debate. I wasn't totally convinced just from this one thing but it was enough to conclude it to be worthy of further investigation although I didn't really get around to it till a couple years later.

I initially knew very little about the Holocaust and it wasn't something I thought much about. I'd heard the basic stuff in school and had seen a few movies about it and that was about it. But as I learned more (even from establishment sources), everything was just off and it wasn't at all what I expected. With the six million, I assumed they did some careful statistics to determine that number and that it had some sort of real basis. I assumed they had found a bunch of gas chambers at the concentration camps, you know, sealed up rooms with pipes and fans and stuff like that. But what do we actually have? A shower/gas chamber at Dachau that was "never used." A "reconstructed" gas chamber at Auschwitz main camp. Some piles of bricks at Birkenau. A shower/delousing facility at Majdanek. I assumed the Germans had an extermination program and that it was run like a typical bureaucratic operation. Then I'm hearing about how they supposedly did it informally without any written orders or generating any sort of paper trail aside from documents with ambiguous "code language." It all sounded like BS but I was still rather cautious in drawing a conclusion just in case there was some kernel of truth to it.

A few "a-ha" moments

-Reading about the delousing process and seeing it as an obvious source of the gassing rumors. Finding accounts from before the war that indicate it was common for people to misinterpret the procedure and assume something horrible was happening to them.
-Learning about atrocity propaganda and especially learning that Jews in particular have a well-documented tendency to lie and exaggerate and are seemingly always claiming to be under threat of extermination (Russian pogroms).
-Realizing that the Allies perpetrated a fraud on the world with their sensational presentation of the camp liberations. Complete with Hollywood directors and psychological warfare operatives.
-Realizing the connection between the 1942 typhus epidemic and high recorded deaths with the construction of the new crematoria in Birkenau in early 1943. And the blueprints show these were constructed to be normal crematoria. Plus the document from Himmler ordering that the high death rates be reduced at all costs.
-Looking into the wartime claims and realizing that they are all over the place with respect to the number of deaths claimed, the alleged methods of execution, and the specifics regarding the camps. Most notably Auschwitz does not feature at all in the propaganda until very late in the war. Also that these claims were unsourced rumors coming from interested parties (Zionists).
-Realizing that right from the beginning the extermination claims were generally used to lobby for opening up Palestine to Jewish refugees from Europe.
-The fact that the Allied governments, the Red Cross, the Vatican all didn't seem to take the extermination claims seriously (although they humored the Zionists somewhat and made some use of it for propaganda). This despite the fact that the Americans had spy planes flying over Auschwitz and the British were reading the German Enigma code. Even Jews themselves did not seem to believe their own propaganda.
If true, they were curiously cooperative with the extermination plan. [Butz's elephant in the basement argument]
-The Katyn thing. How the Germans found the mass graves with thousands of bodies and actually did a relatively disciplined investigation. The Soviets were then eager to find something equivalent as they moved west but they never did. In their reports the Soviets say the Germans dug up all the mass graves and burned all the bodies, destroying all evidence of their crimes. Suuuure.
-Actually reading a lot of the key documents like the WRB report or the Hoess confession or the Soviet Majdanek and Auschwitz reports or the Nuremberg transcripts or wartime newspaper reports. If you read mainstream historians, they will sanitize and harmonize everything. If you read revisionist work debunking these things, that will provoke doubt but it can actually be less convincing than just reading it because one almost assumes they must be strawmanning these things. You have to read it yourself to realize they aren't.
Lastly here are two "indirect" but very important ones
-Most people do not have the intellectual confidence to take a fringe position in isolation and hence will tend only do so if they see other intelligent, credible people taking the same position. If seemingly "everyone" around you believes in the Holocaust, even if you personally find revisionist arguments convincing, you might wonder if you're missing something or if you've gone crazy. It helps to realize that in fact A LOT of people have questioned the Holocaust and that these people were often perfectly reputable up until they got into revisionism. It's actually extraordinary just how many people have dedicated significant time and resources to this and how much has been published despite the strong incentives not to do so.
-Another big thing was realizing that the mainstream side just doesn't have good answers for any of this. The mainstream scholars have produced surprisingly little directly responding to revisionism. They insist the arguments are so ridiculous they aren't even worth responding to but at some point I have to conclude that they are just bluffing.

[Lamprecht]

Archie:

Most people do not have the intellectual confidence to take a fringe position in isolation and hence will tend only do so if they see other intelligent, credible people taking the same position. If seemingly "everyone" around you believes in the Holocaust, even if you personally find revisionist arguments convincing, you might wonder if you're missing something or if you've gone crazy. It helps to realize that in fact A LOT of people have questioned the Holocaust and that these people were often perfectly reputable up until they got into revisionism. It's actually extraordinary just how many people have dedicated significant time and resources to this and how much has been published despite the strong incentives not to do so.

But according to the ADL's own figures, "Holocaust denial" is in no way a fringe position. See my most recent post especially here:

The rapid proliferation of Holocaust skepticism across the world
viewtopic.php?t=12194

Nearly 1/3 of people worldwide who have heard about the "Holocaust" believe it is a myth or greatly exaggerated.

[FearlessChuck]

Coles video.

Then One third of the Holocaust cemented it for eternity. Im forever in Denierbud's debt.

[Archie]

Archie:

Most people do not have the intellectual confidence to take a fringe position in isolation and hence will tend only do so if they see other intelligent, credible people taking the same position. If seemingly "everyone" around you believes in the Holocaust, even if you personally find revisionist arguments convincing, you might wonder if you're missing something or if you've gone crazy. It helps to realize that in fact A LOT of people have questioned the Holocaust and that these people were often perfectly reputable up until they got into revisionism. It's actually extraordinary just how many people have dedicated significant time and resources to this and how much has been published despite the strong incentives not to do so.

But according to the ADL's own figures, "Holocaust denial" is in no way a fringe position. See my most recent post especially here:

The rapid proliferation of Holocaust skepticism across the world
viewtopic.php?t=12194

Nearly 1/3 of people worldwide who have heard about the "Holocaust" believe it is a myth or greatly exaggerated.

I guess it depends on how you define the sample space. It's certainly not fringe in the Muslim world. In Western countries it might not be exactly "fringe" by some measures but it certainly is in intellectual and academic circles. I get that those circles are very politically correct but when you have to venture outside that circle it's still true that you find a lot of crackpot stuff and hence some caution is required.

There's usually a big split between popular surveys and academic opinion on a lot of topics. I've seen polls that something like half of Americans are basically 9/11 truthers and something like 11% of millennials think the moon landing was a hoax. I think support for flat earth is also surprisingly non-trivial. But that's not exactly what I'm talking about because, personally, I don't give much weight to what some random guy thinks about the moon landing, flat earth, etc. But if a considerable number of physicists and former NASA engineers start saying the moon landing was faked then I might get curious about it.

With the Holocaust, among intellectuals and academics in the West, there aren't many who openly deny it. And even among far right intellectuals most are more or less silent on the matter. I think this makes things more difficult. At least it did for me because I had to rely more on my own independent evaluation of the evidence and arguments and wasn't willing to rely on the personal reputation of the revisionists. I think most people will tend to doubt themselves when forming this sort of independent opinion. You either have to find an expert you trust or essentially become your own expert. When I learned more about people like Rassinier, Staeglich, Butz, Faurisson, Rudolf, etc I became more comfortable trusting their judgment and opinions.

[Carto's Cutlass Supreme]

Archie wrote,

With the Holocaust, among intellectuals and academics in the West, there aren't many who openly deny it. And even among far right intellectuals most are more or less silent on the matter. I think this makes things more difficult. At least it did for me because I had to rely more on my own independent evaluation of the evidence and arguments and wasn't willing to rely on the personal reputation of the revisionists.

I had the same problem. If no experts (in this case historians) are denying the holocaust, then does that mean I'm a nutjob? What helped me so much was this forum. When I made the video "One Third Of The Holocaust." I would be on this forum reading, posting, daily as part of the videomaking process. I had never in my life at that point had a verbal person to person open holocaust denial discussion. So this forum was the (very important) connection to others. I wish I could get that mojo back somehow and make new videos.

[stinky]

As I have mentioned in a previous post on another topic, learning about the harsh punishment & overt censorship received by revisionists sparked my curiosity in the arguments against the holocaust narrative.
I thought, why are such heavy handed measures required to defend something that everyone knows happened?
When reading further, another thing that struck me was learning of the (mostly now discarded) inventions of such ridiculous accusations.
What was the need to do such a thing when there were mountains of evidence proving the real, genuine, unquestionable, evil, dastardly actions of the Germans?
Looking at C.W. Porter's work was a real eye opener.
Hunt & Bud's videos were influential, as were the many videos by the great Ernst Zundel

[Archie]

Another thing is that whenever I read orthodox/believer material, some of it can sound kind of superficially convincing but only on points that I am unfamiliar with. Whenever they mention something that I have looked into, their claims are not only unconvincing but often ridiculous. And when I decide to investigate a particular point to see if it checks out invariably I find they are relying on postwar statements or, if actual wartime documents, usually the source says much less than they want it to say. Occasionally it will be a fair but inconclusive point. The leap from the actual document to their conclusions is often considerable yet they usually give you no hint of this in their narrative.

As an example, I was reading some Walter Laqueur a couple days ago. He throws out a lot of stuff that would be very convincing if he could prove what he says (e.g. "Mussolini had been informed by Hilter about the true meaning of the 'final solution' in early 1942," citation needed!). Much of it I was not directly familiar with and hence I could not rebut all of it on the fly as I read. But I would come across some points where I knew exactly what he was referring to. For example he's discussing Babi Yar and he refers to a Nov 1941 JTA report and he refers to it as "remarkably accurate." Now by chance I had read that exact report a month ago and needless to say I was less than impressed with it.
https://forum.codoh.com/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=13562&p=98891#p98891

[Hektor]

Well it took years, but I started smelling the coffee, when I realised how pushy and intrusive the atrocity stories were spoon-fed to people including myself. This, while any other atrocities (e.g. against Germans) were virtually absent from the conversation.

I visited a Kibbutz in Israel (Many here did actually do so - since Israel was more open to travel than most other countries prior to 1994) and there some older Jews told me actually stories that didn't match the common narrative. e.g. that they were fleeing from Hungary, when the Red Army marched in there, to Germany where they were given refuge.

So the Holocaust narrative was at least extremely one-sided. But then the question of the actual evidence came up. Well, that was absent from the conversation. In school they showed us pictures from "The liberation of the camps", obviously to prime us to believe that this would be evidence for an extermination program. Later I found out that the conditions were actually due to bombing and crowding and not the result of a deliberate NS-Extermination program of Jews. The differences between physical conditions of prisoners were also telling. The final nail in the coffin was the Rudolf-Report and subsequent discussion and rebuttal attempts by Holocaust-believers. Their rabid personal attacks and insults and fallacious argumentation was quite telling to me.

It should be noted that in South Africa there were many people that were pro-German and there was already some disbelieve in the narrative. But there was/is also a larger Jewish Community that pushed the issue, as well as many Colonials that were pro-British and pushed the issue as well. The Holocaust ideology didn't have that much hegemonial power as it had in Germany, the Netherlands or even the US. I also met elder Germans that were sceptical about this. It's just that virtually nobody had hard evidence or proof for their position. Anecdotes yes, but not something that could count as outcome of an investigation. The later being a feasible option only for those that are able and willing to spend vast resources on the issue. This excludes more than 99.9% of people right from start. Well, Leuchter and Rudolf did. But those are clearly exceptions from the rule. What is however interesting is the fact that the Holocaust Industry neglected investigation of physical evidence for decades altogether. They only did do some lame attempts of refutation after the Leuchter and Rudolf had published their reports. It's telling that those post-Leuchter refutation attempts aren't translated into German, since one would expect that the Holocaust Lobby there would be happy to finally have a silver bullet against "Holocaust Deniers". Clearly do they fear more public debate on the issue, which would result in more people doubting and investigating the narrative.