That first thing that changed your mind

[Rockartisten]

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.

Your first paragraph...yes yes yes! I was veeeeery interested at that point when I saw that, and the propaganda of that show with emotional rebuttal almost made me feel like changing my mind because it was so pathetic. It started off so good, and then....emotions and stories again. It was always the stories wherever I turned. I was like, "really, that's all you got? More sob stories?".

[Hektor]

Hello, I'm new here, but I have been reading posts for a while now.

My first impression of something being untrue concerning the traditional Holocaust narrative began when I was in high school, and I took a six week social-studies module focusing on the period of World War II and the National Socialist period of German history.

Like many children who grew up in the United Staes at that time, I had been subjected to a fair amount of Holocaust awareness (not being called that in those days), and I remember being taught the Anne Frank story in the third grade (when we were eight years old), and I remember not really believing the part where somehow, a large family had lived in, and hid between the walls of an apartment.

At any rate, I remember the teacher in the high school class explaining to us that it was actually a British soldier who was operating the bulldozer moving the bodies in the movie, “Nazi Concentration Camps”, and I remember wondering things like, who unclothed these bodies and piled them them into mounds for the bulldozer, why weren’t these bodies all black from Livor Mortis or Pallor Mortis, which should start setting in within hours of death, even though these bodies were supposed to have been laying around well before the British even took control of the camp, and shouldn’t the bulldozer have ripped these decaying corpses into shreds?

I would be puzzled by many aspects of the Holocaust narrative, and then changing my mind completely after reading the first edition of David Irving's book, "Hitler's War", with his writings on not agreeing with certain aspects which were widely accepted at that time.

"Holocaust Awareness" should already raise a Red Flag. Why is the issue even relevant for American Kids.
As for "dead bodies" - I don't think this impressed people that experienced the war, too much. Even if they bought the narrative, their response probably was: Some more dead bodies, so what. With decades of experiencing peace, the whole thing got however decontextualized. While people nominally know that this is related to a major war, they don't grasp the concept in the same way. I think "the Holocaust" was merely a niche thing in the 1945-1970 period. People were more aware of their own losses during the war. With almost a generation past this did however change. That's why the issue became more and more pressing during the 1970s. It's the 68ers that also picked it up with "The Nazis" taken as an example of "Authoritarianism" as well as "repressed sexuality". For younger leftist Germans this was also a convenient truncheon they could use against the older generation. In Allied countries they could approach it more from the angle that the older generation could not really argue against them, since they themselves had "fought against a racist, sexist, homophobic, fascist, militaristic, later capitalistic" regime. That the labels are leftist dysphemism is irrelevant, what counts is that they could style it that way.

[Wachtman]

Your mention of the leftists and cultural upheaval is very important in my opinion, especially if one considers the Summer of 2020, the the ad-nauseam attacks of the conservative right happening every day right now!

[Hektor]

Your mention of the leftists and cultural upheaval is very important in my opinion, especially if one considers the Summer of 2020, the the ad-nauseam attacks of the conservative right happening every day right now!

It's essentially a push by the New Left that emerged after world war two. The theoretical work on this started already in the 1920s with the Frankfurt School trying to figure out what prevented the success of the Communist Revolution in Western Countries. They took a deep interest in Psychology especially the Freudian Concepts of super-ego, ego and it. What they promulgated was the "liberation" of the It from restrictions by super-ego and ego, which limited behaviour by morality and identity. This is why they pushed for "sexual liberation". Furthermore they threw "the workers" under the bus as far as revolutionary class and viewed intellectuals on the one hand and marginalised groups on the other as revolutionary classes. So what they did was get their advocates into positions related to higher learning to transform the universities from within, while mobilising the marginalised on the streets. The "Civil Rights movement" in the US is one such an example, but the homosexual movement would be another. The target would be straight, white males from which ranks virtually all positions of influence and decision making in Western societies were filled. It would of course also the class that would resist a take-over of their societies - that's if they had support of their women as well as a masculine instinct to protect their families against the vile affections of government, creeps and perverts. That's were feminism and women's lib gets in. Inciting rebellious minds into kids helps as well.... I recall someone here that pointed out similarities with the cult of Dionysius/Bacchus in the classical civilisations... There was of course more under fire. Nationalism/national identity for one, which was done with an attack on history. But also the Arts, religion, philosophy, virtually anything that has some influence on culture. The schools and publishers implement this then via school books, curricula. policy decisions, promoted literature, etc. Without a national identity a sense of belonging to a community to which one also has duties, without a moral compass take overs or blowing politics into a desired direction are far more easy to do. You can even keep the governmental and business structures intact just make them somehow part of your centralised control system.

[danewerk]

What fully convinced me was the claim that diesel exhaust was used in the gas chambers at Treblinka, Sobibor, and Belzec. I sometimes worked in a truck repair shop as a teenager, and the non-acute toxicity of diesel fumes was well known to everyone that worked there (of course, you should avoid breathing diesel exhausts anyway).

Interested persons should read revisionist Friedrich Berg on the topic.

Even before that I was aware of the many ridiculously silly claims and stories, but I still had a remaining doubt because, purely logically, a historical event can be true even though some fools have added obvious lies. The diesel story on the other hand, as it is claimed to be the only method of killing used at these three camps, rules out the extermination narrative in its entirety.

In addition I soon realized that the amount of fuel, presumably wood, needed to incinerate 900,000 bodies (at Treblinka) in open air pyres would be colossal; about 1000 tons per day during the 6 months or so that the burnings took place. None of the "witnesses" that I'm aware of mention working with the wood more than in passing, although in reality the unloading and handling would require more work than dragging the bodies out of the gas chambers.

It should be mentioned that the HDOT site (Holocaust Denial on Trial) says in their page on the lethality of diesel exhaust that a modified engine (mode D, air intake restricted) can produce 22% carbon monoxide (approx. 0.5% is considered to be lethal in minutes). This is just a straight out falsehood however as the cited paper (Pattle et al., 1957) gives the CO concentration from a modified engine as 0.17%. Two identical experiments were conducted and the measured concentrations were 0.12% and 0.22% (0.17% being the average).

HDOT:

What the 1957 study by R.E. Pattle et al found:

In the Pattle study, the exhaust from a single-cylinder diesel engine was directed into a chamber with a volume of 10 cubic meters (353 cubic feet) of air in which mice, guinea pigs, and rabbits were placed. The engine was then run for five hours in four different modes until the animals were dead, disabled, or clearly going to survive.

In Mode A, the engine was run according to the manufacturer’s specifications. The animals survived the entire five hours and recovered with no ill effects.

In Modes B and C, the engine was slightly modified. Some of the animals died in the fourth hour of the experiment and others died several days later from severe lung damage.

However, in Mode D, in which a metal blank was used to reduce the size of the air intake, all of the animals died in three hours and 20 minutes. Analysis of the atmosphere in Mode D showed that it contained 22 percent carbon monoxide (or 220,000 parts per 1,000,000).[5] For humans, a carbon monoxide concentration of 4/10 of one percent (.4%) or 4,000 parts per 1,000,000 parts of the atmosphere is lethal

.

https://www.hdot.org/debunking-denial/d ... -monoxide/

[10/29/97]

I grew up with a father in the military, who was well read on U.S history, especially all of the wars the U.S were involved in, from our founding. His specialty was The American Civil War and World War II. I started reading anything I could get my hands onto on both subjects from an early age. The Third Reich always fascinated me as our family immigrated from Germany in the late 17th century. From the beginning of my reading/researching, I realized one book would contradict what another book stated as "fact". I began to get suspicious, that there were what I considered "fantastic", then unbelievable facts. Until finding CODOH in 2020, I had to depend on mainstream information, which is corrupted, like everything in the mainstream of this world. With the banning of whatever is not of "popular opinion", that has skyrocketed in the last 10 years, I began to dig deep in search of nagging questions that I had involving especially the "Holocaust". I struck the golden nugget with Germar Rudolf's "Chemistry of Auschwitz". The reference to CODOH and Castle Hill Books led me to many more books, including "Air Photo Evidence" and Arthur Butz's masterful "Hoax of the 20th Century", among a score of others. Needless to say I have enjoyed "thinning" my library of corrupted material. My Grand Daughter calls me the man of 10,000 subjects, of which she is an inheritor through DNA. I started her with the small "Holocaust" pamphlet Fact vs Fiction. She is now reading "Hoax of the 20th Century". When I first broached the subject of the "Holocaust" with her, I asked her a simple question. "Why is anything banned". It is an individuals choice of whether they want to see something or not. That decision is not for anyone to make but that individual, no matter what the subject is.

[JohnDoe1964]

I realized one book would contradict what another book stated as "fact".

While still uncertain of my position on the issue, and reading MK, I started looking for what Jews had to say, to hear both sides.

I didn't do this long. I remember having one browser tab with MK opened to the page describing the symbolism of the Nazi flag, and in another tab searching Google Books for relevant keywords. One result I clicked on was a page in a book by an author with an apparently Jewish name, and it explicitly said the red signified blood. With no citation¹.

I did expect blatant lying, but I was still shocked. It was the same with Hitler's reason for hating Jews. I always heard that it was an unsettled question, an interesting area of research, maybe due to his experience as a child with a Jewish professor. So much conjecture.

But then in MK he says exactly why he hated them. So all this "uncertainty" has to be deliberate deception.

Not sure if that's the precise moment, but it was one of the biggest things. Another is the Big Lie meme. I always see the Big Lie quote from Mein Kampf out of context, which is genius because it makes Hitler look like he's admitting to lying to make Jews look bad. But if you read it in context it's saying the exact opposite.

By the way, I propose that https://thomasdaltonphd.com be given a more prominent place on this site. All the material there is very well-written and to-the-point. I know if I had been aware of it, it would have saved me a year of personal research. But I don't know how much of it was written after 2015.

¹I tried but failed to dig up this book again.

[Ross]

I started questioning the Holocaust narratives due to infographics such as the attached picture.

One Third of the Holocaust by DenierBud (aka Dean Irebud) is what fully convinced me, although many other videos and books have been helpful in covering the other two thirds.

[Hektor]

I recall getting hold of some of the publications by Udo Walendy pointing out that there was a lot wrong with "Holocaust Education" materials that were sold as the 'honest truth' at the time. Interestingly a lot of it came from the Eastern Block at the time. And it was rather crudely done.

Doesn't mean the Western stuff was any better. What they used were essentially the sykewar materials compiled into shockumentaries like "Nazi Concentration Camps". And it was sold as 'truthful accounts', which this most definitely was not. This and similar materials were also distributed to school children, despite this not in line with guidelines that were applied to horror movies and the like (It was 18 VNP, I'd say).

The exceptional treatment it got and also the pushy nature of how it was presented got me suspicious.

And yes, them keeping changing their story indicates a foregone conclusion being in place and that their theory was not following first-the-facts-then-the-conclusions. It is like Bill alleging Tom murdered Peter without first looking at the evidence. But try getting this into the mind of people. What seems to hinder them is that they can't believe someone would be lying with such an audacity to them. Worse they can't admit to themselves that they were duped and fell for the fraud.

[Eduardo]

For me, it was the book of the Spanish revisionist Joaquín Bochaca "El mito de los seis millones" (the myth of the six millions). Many posters were in the streets of Madrid and Barcelona as a response to the TV film "Holocaust" (after Gerald Green's novel), shown in Spain in 1979.

[Hektor]

For me, it was the book of the Spanish revisionist Joaquín Bochaca "El mito de los seis millones" (the myth of the six millions). Many posters were in the streets of Madrid and Barcelona as a response to the TV film "Holocaust" (after Gerald Green's novel), shown in Spain in 1979.

I presume it is the soap opera "Holocaust". Which was a 70s production looking like it was 'made for TV'.
Basically an assemblage of cliches on the subject. It is pretty B-class, but I think it had a huge impact of getting 'the Holocaust' into the minds of the general public.

I just wonder... Why did they show it in Spain? It is past Franco of course. And I realize that Franco wasn't exactly fond of Jews. But the soap opera 'Holocaust' was merely about Jews in Germany and Eastern Europe. It wasn't a 'documentary' neither, but entirely fiction and in big parts simply made up. But that isn't what an audience realizes and even if they do, the sublime effects remain.

[cold beer]

For me the collapse soap hoax reenforced and activated the principle that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

[Eduardo]

For me, it was the book of the Spanish revisionist Joaquín Bochaca "El mito de los seis millones" (the myth of the six millions). Many posters were in the streets of Madrid and Barcelona as a response to the TV film "Holocaust" (after Gerald Green's novel), shown in Spain in 1979.

I presume it is the soap opera "Holocaust". Which was a 70s production looking like it was 'made for TV'.
Basically an assemblage of cliches on the subject. It is pretty B-class, but I think it had a huge impact of getting 'the Holocaust' into the minds of the general public.

I just wonder... Why did they show it in Spain? It is past Franco of course. And I realize that Franco wasn't exactly fond of Jews. But the soap opera 'Holocaust' was merely about Jews in Germany and Eastern Europe. It wasn't a 'documentary' neither, but entirely fiction and in big parts simply made up. But that isn't what an audience realizes and even if they do, the sublime effects remain.

Yes, it was "Holocaust" TV serie form the 70's, based on the novel "Holocaust" by Gerald Green. After Franco's death, a huge media campaign arose against him and the holocaust was an important issue, of course. That campaign amounted to the normalization of Spain in the context of other European countries. There were many former "fascists" living in Spain and the authorities allowed a freedom of speech impossible for other countries, say, Germany or France. Therefore, the situation had to be changed. The turning point was the detention of book seller and former CEDADE chief, Pedro Varela in 1996.

[Hektor]

....
Yes, it was "Holocaust" TV serie form the 70's, based on the novel "Holocaust" by Gerald Green. After Franco's death, a huge media campaign arose against him and the holocaust was an important issue, of course. That campaign amounted to the normalization of Spain in the context of other European countries. There were many former "fascists" living in Spain and the authorities allowed a freedom of speech impossible for other countries, say, Germany or France. Therefore, the situation had to be changed. The turning point was the detention of book seller and former CEDADE chief, Pedro Varela in 1996.

Where they accusing Franco of killing Jews with X-Rays?
Franco was in Spain during WW2. Only the Blue Legion went outside to fight against the USSR.

The Holocaust TV-series was pure fiction, drama. But people took it like a 'documentary' or 'true story'.

And well, Franco died in the 1970s. After he had reinstituted the monarch and the country then became a parliamentary monarchy that was to be similar to lets say Belgium. They have to start out with 'freedom of speech' after which they institute other mechanism to control information/communication. So the 'fascists' get tolerated for a while, while their old organizations run dry over time. Have seen this elsewhere as well. Organizations from the "old order" persist. But they increasingly will find it difficult to recruit new members and essentially it gets an old boys club over time. It's not only the 'righties' that have that problem. The leftist organizations have that as well.
Those organizations run like a club with people having a common interest. They have to rely on members that are willing to be disciplined and their needs to be a capable leadership... But it isn't a given to persist. Culture is changing, behavior is changing and it doesn't seem to be the case that it is more conducive for organizations with voluntary membership. People also get sick with 'the politics' and rather pursuit private interests. The clubs seem to have been replaced by NGO's. Those NGO's are however organizations that PAY the people that are part of it. And it's a lucrative thing for people that studied something in humanities. Politologists, Sociologists, Psychologists, people in the languages, sometimes history and theology. Political parties can buy such staff as well. They usually are then after a career there and there is internal competition between the members biting each other out there. While they are usually pretty clever actors and won't show this conflicts to the public. It has become far more difficult to start an organization and get appropriate members for this. Those that join are disgruntled and those that run'm are often not the real McCoy neither.

I'd assume that schooling and media also changed in Spain distributing in accordance with the European model of 'Socialists', 'Liberals', Cuckservatives and perhaps the Greens being added. The names vary and there may be competing organisations over some segment of the voters. But that's how it worked in the 'parliamentary democracies'. There is connectivity with Unions, Churches, Media and lobby-groups as well. It's pay to play then. Transactional leadership. To me it looks that the decisions they make get more nutty. As for the righties in other countries. They quickly get infiltrated, remodeled and sabotaged by the intelligence services neutralizing them effectively. They don't get necessarily banned, but, but kept under 2% of the vote and it seems to be a key priority to keep educated middle class out of them. The later is achieved through stigmatization. Simply give them some bad press occasionally and this will do the job.

That they jail someone is rather rare, but it happens, then something must have happened that is more important to them than the democratic mask they like to wear.

The argument against 'fascists' is of course simply claiming that they 'want to destroy democracy' and hence don't deserve the 'advantages of democracy'. It's the, actually foolish, "No tolerance for intolerance-gambit. Franco was at least honest.

[hermod]

....
Yes, it was "Holocaust" TV serie form the 70's, based on the novel "Holocaust" by Gerald Green. After Franco's death, a huge media campaign arose against him and the holocaust was an important issue, of course. That campaign amounted to the normalization of Spain in the context of other European countries. There were many former "fascists" living in Spain and the authorities allowed a freedom of speech impossible for other countries, say, Germany or France. Therefore, the situation had to be changed. The turning point was the detention of book seller and former CEDADE chief, Pedro Varela in 1996.

Where they accusing Franco of killing Jews with X-Rays?
Franco was in Spain during WW2. Only the Blue Legion went outside to fight against the USSR.

Guilt by association (aka felony murders). As Maurice Bardèche correctly noted in his 1948 book Nuremberg or The Promised Land, not only the German National Socialists were condemned at the Nuremberg show trial. All of us were dispossessed in Nuremberg and all the [non-Jewish] people opposing the globalization of their own homeland were condemned at the Nuremberg show trial, Bardèche wrote. So all the Nationalists are now evil bastards with a criminal worldview, according to Globalist propaganda. And the Nationalists who directly worked with Hitler must of course be regarded and portrayed as super-evil arch-criminals, even those who caused the death of much fewer people than Churchill and Roosevelt did during both world wars (i.e. Globalist bloodbaths for the Judaization of the so-called "Holy Land" and the establishment of a one-world government).

Unsurprisingly, the demonization and/or criminalization of Nationalism is a crucial weapon in the arsenal of Globalists.