The article is here: https://www.snopes.com/news/2017/04/17/ ... ial-works/
I will be quoting from the article and adding some brief comments.
How Holocaust Denial Works
What motivates some people to reject the overwhelming historical evidence and claim the Holocaust never occurred?
David Emery
Published 14 April 2017
The Holocaust happened.
It is a fact that some six million European Jews were systematically murdered by Nazi Germany and its collaborators between 1941 and 1945 in a state-sponsored program of genocide.
Oh, it's a fact? Let's see what kind of evidence is provided.
The National Socialists came to power in part by convincing Germans that many of the country’s problems were caused by its Jewish minority, whom they labeled an “inferior race” and depicted as depraved and animal-like in anti-Semitic propaganda. They named their plan for exterminating the Jews the “Final Solution.” Their implementation of a plan to exterminate the Jews — the “Final Solution,” they called it — has been well documented, starting with the 3,000 tons of confiscated Third Reich paperwork presented in evidence at the Nuremberg trials immediately after the war.
Indeed, the "Final Solution" is very well documented. However, the documents which mention this policy explicitly contradict the claim that it was a policy of extermination. They define it as resettlement, deportation and forced labor although ultimately it was decided to be postponed until after the war.
Yet, despite universal agreement among historians about all of the above (“No serious historian questions that the Holocaust took place,” the American Historical Association affirmed in a 1991 statement)
How can we know how many "serious historians" actually question the Holocaust if they live in a country where it is a crime to do so publicly? And when it is not a crime, they will be called "anti-Semitic" and harassed by hate groups like the ADL and SPLC.
And what differentiates between a serious historian and one that is not serious? Sounds like the No True Scotsman fallacy to me, plus claims of telepathic ability.
there exists a tiny but vocal group of naysayers — conspiracy theorists, actually, given that they claim that “Jewish-controlled” academic and media institutions “invented” the Holocaust — whose mission it is to sow doubt that the genocide of European Jews ever happened. They are known (to everyone but themselves) as Holocaust deniers.
The Allied governments invented [or reiterated] many false claims at the various post-war tribunals that have been exposed as such since the 1940s. And the "Holocaust" story itself is the conspiracy theory. And yes, the idea is to make people question the alleged genocide, why not? If the evidence is so overwhelming, there shouldn't be any problems with people questioning it.
Here are some basic tenets of Holocaust denialism (via the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum):
Holocaust denial” describes attempts to negate the established facts of the Nazi genocide of European Jewry. Common denial assertions are: that the murder of six million Jews during World War II never occurred; that the Nazis had no official policy or intention to exterminate the Jews; and that the poison gas chambers in Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp never existed.
A newer trend is the distortion of the facts of the Holocaust. Common distortions include, for example, assertions that: the figure of six million Jewish deaths is an exaggeration; deaths in the concentration camps were the results of disease or starvation but not policy; and that the diary of Anne Frank is a forgery.
Besides the Anne Frank diary being a forgery, which doesn't really matter because Anne Frank's story contradicts the "Holocaust" narrative, those points are more or less correct. There were of course some executions in some of the camps for a variety of reasons and the camp death records confirm this. Despite these execution records there is not a single case of a a Jew being killed in a homicidal gas chamber.
The deniers aren’t known for their subtlety. “I don’t see any reason to be tasteful about Auschwitz,” said author, anti-Semite, and Holocaust denier David Irving in 1991. He continued:
It’s baloney, it’s a legend. Once we admit the fact that it was a brutal slave labor camp and large numbers of people did die, as large numbers of innocent people died elsewhere in the War, why believe the rest of the baloney?
I say quite tastelessly, in fact, that more women died on the back seat of Edward Kennedy’s car at Chappaquiddick than ever died in a gas chamber in Auschwitz.
At a 2006 conference of Holocaust deniers in Iran hosted by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the country’s former interior minister said, without irony, “All the studies and research carried out so far have proven that there is no reason to believe that the Holocaust ever occurred and that it is only a tale.”
Others at the conference admitted the killings took place, but claimed the numbers were inflated:
Frederick Toben, an Australian who in 1999 served jail time in Germany for his Holocaust views, told the conference in no uncertain terms that the number of Jews killed in Nazi death camps — an estimated 6 million — is a myth.
”The number of victims at the Auschwitz concentration camp could be about 2,007,” Toben said. ”The railroad to the camp did not have enough capacity to transfer large numbers of Jews.”
Well they didn't "admit the killings took place" and stating that "The Holocaust didn't occur" isn't claiming that nobody was killed or that nobody died. This author is just using the term "Holocaust" in different ways in different sentences.
Anyway, that quote from Toben appears to be inaccurate, I made a thread about it:
Did Frederick Toben claim "The number of victims at the Auschwitz concentration camp could be about 2,007"?
viewtopic.php?t=12645
It just doesn't make any sense. Has anyone ever asked Toben to verify that he said that? Nope. We have over 58 thousand documented Jewish deaths from typhus alone at Auschwitz and revisionists do not dispute these figures. What they do dispute is the absurd and baseless claim of "over 1 million" Jewish deaths. The same records also document 114 executions of Jews - in comparison to 1,465 executions of Poles. So "Holocaust denial" never was the claim that there was nobody killed by Germany during World War II, like this Snopes article tries to argue. That's total nonsense. The camps simply were not set up or used for that purpose.
Don’t mistake these for sincere historical quibbles. They are direct misstatements of the evidentiary record — a record whose existence, again, we owe in large part to the Nazis themselves.
All of these articles listed have been completely debunked by revisionists.
Examples:
The Chemistry of Auschwitz—The Technology and Toxicology of Zyklon B and the Gas Chambers – A Crime-Scene Investigation
http://holocausthandbooks.com/index.php?page_id=2
Auschwitz: Technique and Operation of the Gas Chambers—An Introduction and Update to Jean-Claude Pressac’s Magnum Opus
http://holocausthandbooks.com/index.php?page_id=42
Auschwitz: Plain Facts—A Response to Jean-Claude Pressac
http://holocausthandbooks.com/index.php?page_id=14
The documents listed at the bottom of the page are mostly just Pressac's fake "Criminal traces" also dealt with here: viewtopic.php?p=94037#p94037
“Extermination, we’re doing it”
Both propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels and SS chief Heinrich Himmler, for example, admitted there was an official plan to exterminate the Jewish population. “The Jews have deserved the catastrophe that has now overtaken them,” Goebbels wrote in his diary in 1942. “Not much will remain of the Jews. On the whole it can be said that about 60 percent of them will have to be liquidated whereas only 40 percent can be used for forced labor.”
Yet the term "liquidate" is not synonymous with murder, and was not always used in that sense. This specific entry is handled here:
Goebbels diary entry, March 1942.
viewtopic.php?t=3763
The preceding sentence shows that Goebbels is actually referring to:
"Starting with Lublin, the Jews are now being deported from the General Government to the East. A rather barbaric method which needs not to be described further is applied, and not much is left over of the Jews. Overall one can ascertain that 60% of them must be liquidated, while only 40% can be deployed for labor deployment.
And Goebbels' personal opinion on what "must be" done is not necessarily the same as what was actually done.
There are many additional Goebbels diary entries showing that he interpreted "Final Solution" as something other than extermination: viewtopic.php?p=95512#p95512
When Jews were being executed, such as in reprisals for partisan actions in the east, he expressed his support. So if "Final Solution" meant extermination of Jews, Goebbels would have made that clear and probably also expressed his support of such measures.
Evacuation, extermination, elimination. Which one is it?Chillingly, Himmler said this in a 1943 speech in Posen, Poland:
I refer now to the evacuation of the Jews, the extermination of the Jewish people. This is one of those things that is easily said: “the Jewish people are being exterminated,” says every Party member, “quite true, it’s part of our plans, the elimination of the Jews, extermination, we’re doing it.”
The word used in this pep-talk -- "Ausrottung" -- in this instance is better translated as "extirpation".
At the Nuremberg trial, Alfred Rosenberg stated:
"I do not need a foreign dictionary in order to explain the various meanings "Ausrottung" may have in the German language. One can exterminate an idea, an economic system a social order, and as a final consequence, also a group of human beings, certainly. Those are the many possibilities which are contained in that word. For that I do not need an English-German dictionary... It means "to overcome" on one side and then it is to be used not with respect to individuals but rather to juridical entities, to certain historical traditions. On the other side this word has been used with respect to the German people and we have also not believed that in consequence thereof 60 millions of Germans would be shot."
And much more on Himmler's pep-talk here: https://en.metapedia.org/wiki/Posen_speeches
and: viewtopic.php?t=12796
No one left behind a ledger sheet tallying the precise number of Jews “exterminated” but that doesn’t mean the figure can’t be accurately estimated based on existing evidence such as census reports and other government records that survived Nazi efforts to destroy them at the end of the war:
Or they could actually show the alleged "huge mass graves" claimed to be in exactly known locations and filled with the remains of hundreds of thousands of victims? Census figures can't be used to estimate Jewish deaths with any accuracy as they are based on self-reported Jewish identity. The religion of Judaism even prohibits censuses and counting Jews.
Rooted in anti-Semitism
Some Holocaust deniers are self-styled “historical revisionists” — meaning they present themselves as earnest re-interpreters of real historical data whose goal is simply to reveal the whole truth — but it’s a misnomer. Scratch the surface of your typical Holocaust denier and you will find an anti-Semite. The notion, widespread among deniers, that Jews “invented” or “exaggerated” the Holocaust to further their own interests hearkens back to a centuries-old conspiracy theory positing a secret “cabal” of wealthy Jewish bankers seeking absolute world domination.
But have they ever considered that it was actually the Allied governments which are responsible for this? Atrocity propaganda is nothing new, it has been going on for centuries if not millennia. I have mostly seen the charge that the Allies orchestrated this fraudulent narrative to justify their war of aggression as well as to cover up their own crimes. Revisionist C.W. Porter even has a book entitled Made in Russia: The Holocaust (PDF)
“The Holocaust is the device used as the pillar of Zionist imperialism, Zionist aggression, Zionist terror and Zionist murder,” former Ku Klux Klan Imperial Wizard David Duke has said (while dismissing the claim that the Nazis used gas chambers to kill Jews as a “myth”).
So what's the issue? Even some Jews dispute the "Holocaust" narrative.
Simon Wiesenthal himself claimed:
“The creation of Israel was the only possible and the only correct reaction to Auschwitz."(Wiesenthal, Simon, Justice Not Vengeance, 1989, p. 224)
Israeli historian Tom Segev stated:
The demonization of Nazism and its mythologizing, in general, were also necessary since the Holocaust served as the main justification for the creation and existence of the State of Israel." (Segev, Tom, The Seventh Million: The Israelis and the Holocaust, 1993 p. 480)
Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin himself referenced supposed "extermination camps" to justify attacks on Israel's neighbors so what David Duke is saying here is not without merit.
In 2013, England’s most infamous Holocaust denier, David Irving (quoted above saying more people died in Ted Kennedy’s car than at Auschwitz), was asked if it weren’t true that Jews “run the world”:
Irving, who strongly denies being anti-semitic, replies: “Well sometimes people stand up and fight back.”
He says Jews in America control all media, banks and that “they dare not appoint any leading person in the White House to ministerial positions involving money without him being a Jew. Look where that got them in Germany in 1933. And they will not learn the lesson, they all think it won’t happen again.
“Then they ask why they are so hated.”
…
Irving says he hears people say Jews are hated because they crucified Jesus Christ. “I say if you walk into a pub in Wapping and ask people why they don’t like the Jews they don’t mention Jesus. They mention other reasons. They’re worried about their mortgages and the banks … that’s the reason why the Jews get hated.”
It’s telling that Irving denies hating Jews while repeatedly observing that “Jews are hated,” then blames them for it.
Well maybe there are reasons why so many people have hated Jews. Hitler had many reasons. Jews have been expelled from over 1,000 places in history. Could it really have been for literally no reason at all?
And calling Irving "Amalek" just wasn't very nice, it means that him and his people should be exterminated.
Famous "Holocaust survivor" Elie Wiesel said that:
"Every Jew, somewhere in his being, should set apart a zone of hate -- healthy, virile hate -- for what the German personifies and for what persists in the German. To do otherwise would be a betrayal of the dead."
Is that also for no reason? Pointing out that something is not unprovoked is not the same as calling it justified or deserved.
The rise of “soft denialism”
There is a relatively new form of Holocaust denialism — dubbed “soft denialism” because its adherents don’t deny the Holocaust outright but attempt to trivialize it instead — whose rise seems to have followed the same curve as that of right-wing nationalist movements worldwide in recent years.
The most prevalent form of soft denialism revolves around the claim that the persecution of Jews in Nazi Germany is given preferential treatment over the persecution of other minority groups by the same regime. But this is a moral deflection. It’s a fact that the Reich persecuted and killed millions of others in the name of “Aryan superiority” — Roma (“gypsies”), Serbs, Poles, individuals with disabilities, individuals perceived as “homosexual,” socialists, communists, and Jehovah’s Witnesses, to name only some of the targeted minorities — but this is no justification for eliding Hitler’s decades-long vendetta against the Jewish people in particular, a vendetta which very nearly ended in their complete eradication.
So he picked on Jews and everyone else for no reason, but had a special vendetta against Jews also for no reason?
The "extermination of Gypsies/Roma and homosexuals" claim is also false. It is true that the Germans did euthanize people with "disabilities" (severe mental illness and terminally handicapped) but this was not any extermination policy and can't even be seen as such. If someone is OK with abortion of perfectly healthy fetuses (and Snopes is publicly "Pro-Choice") then I don't see how they can take the moral high ground and say that it's wrong to euthanaze mentally defective or physically deformed individuals with no hope of ever taking care of themselves.
Jehovah’s Witnesses refused conscription and were imprisoned in other countries (such as the USA) for this very reason. There was no extermination. Germany was at war with the USSR, so "communists" were seen [and rightfully so] as a subversive element. None of this was motivated by "Aryan supremacy" at all.
Did the US government put US citizens of Japanese descent in camps because of "White supremacy"? 90% of Americans would have rather lost WWII than give Blacks equality!
In January 2017, President Trump was roundly criticized for issuing a statement “in the name of the perished” on Holocaust Remembrance Day, held on the anniversary of the 1945 liberation of the Auschwitz concentration camp, that never once mentioned the Jewish victims of that tragedy:
Yes, and in response to this statement by Trump, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency published an article admitting the "5 million non-Jew" deaths from the "Holocaust" was a completely invented number designed to deceive. It was a lie.
The rest of the article is just devoted to whining about Trump, somehow. Literally an entire third is devoted to whining about Trump not mentioning Jews, and then quoting some "White supremacist" who congratulated him for it on Twitter.
I could write a better article: "How shilling Holocaust works". It's simple:
1. Call "Holocaust denial" anti-Semitic
2. Claim the "Holocaust" is a proven fact. Over and over again
3. Post "evidence" for the "Holocaust" that has already been debunked/addressed by revisionists
4. Cherry pick a few quotes from "deniers" to make them seem like bad people who hate Jews for no reason
5. Do not post any actual revisionist arguments, and distort them at every opportunity
People only deny the "Holocaust" because they hate Jews. And they hate Jews because they don't believe the "Holocaust." And that's why you need to believe in the "Holocaust" - because otherwise you hate Jews, which is evil!
