Holocaust Denial Dissected

I propose a new forum wherein the 'arguments' of Holocaust Denial are dissected. The purpose of this forum is to elucidate the failures in evidence handling, historiography, reasoning and logic commonly seen in the arguments of Holocaust Deniers, as well as to make clear the unspoken (and unexamined) assumptions underlying the thinking of Holocaust Deniers: to, as it were, create a 'bestiary' of the mistakes deniers make.

The purpose of this forum is _not_ to defend the historical account of the Holocaust, though discussions of what constitutes such a defense will, of course, play a part in this forum. The presumption is that the verdict of history has been passed and we, in this forum, are here to elucidate how the historiographical 'program' of Holocaust Denial has failed.

Thanks William!! I was getting lonely!!

I propose the following as the first point of discussion.

Holocaust Deniers frequently claim that they have no burden of proof, that they are merely 'expressing doubts.' This claim is a rather transparent attempt to gain immunity from any requirement that they defend their 'case' by claiming that they aren't actually making a case, and the case has to be made _to them_ instead.

I say that this claim is hogwash, for the following reasons

In the absence of a tendency on the part of the 'doubter' it stands to reason that the 'doubts' would fall more or less evenly on both sides of the issue. To the extent that the 'doubts' fall on one side of the issue shows a tendency on the part of the 'doubter' to believe one or the other side of the issue. This *tendency* demands defense, as it usually arises from unspoken assumptions. The 'doubter' shouldn't shirk their intellectual responsibilities in defending whatever underlying (and possibly unexamined) assumptions causes them to demonstrate this particular tendency. Therefore the claim that a denier is merely 'expressing doubts' is not a sufficient defense against the requirement that they defend the reasonableness of their 'doubts.'

Any fool can have 'doubts', the question is: are those doubts rationally justified? I hold that no one is _required_ to answer anyone's 'doubts' until the 'doubter' has demonstrated some knowledge of the subject and has, at least, acknowledged that they bear some responsibility to show that their 'doubts' have merit.

I hold the following to be axiomatic: The burden of proof in any discussion falls on the party who is the _skeptic_, the person who holds that received wisdom is incorrect.

Aside from this being the custom in debate, it also follows from a very simple and common sense observation: were we to take the opposite approach nothing would ever be settled. Every time some 'doubter' comes along expressing spurious doubts based on specious arguments, ignorance of the subject, misinterpretations of evidence and whatever other failures we've seen in the course of perusing the 'arguments' of Holocaust deniers we'd be forced by custom to stop and patiently rebut every charge made by someone who, in the end, is shown to either be completely ignorant of the topic, or to be duplicitously arguing what they know to be false.

Therefore, I reject deniers claim that they can reject out of hand any and all proofs from history merely because they have 'doubts' about them. In the absence of a clear rebuttal of some particular assertion of history from a denier, the statement of history stands.

Discussion?

I agree with your posts, William H. Daffer. I've never understood why those who profess to be so interested in the past ignore the work of every historian who's ever studied it.

Hi John Lane!!

Was hoping you'd wander by!

We'll probably hit 10,000 again in no time.

I am curious about the mathematical contortions used in an attempt to deny the possibility of burying certain amounts of people in certaqin amounts of space and time. I wish someone would translate that into plain English, where I am sure it can be refuted.

How much does eyewitness testimony count for in a court of law?

While you're at it, perhaps you can discover why an Israeli court found Demjanjuk not to be Ivan the terrible, but was another man IVAN MARCHENKO, and why the justice dept withheld evidence that this was true and why germany is now trying the same man whom israel rightly cut loose for the same crimes he was found innocent of because he was not that man and it was proven! It's a witch hunt and they ought to be ashamed of themselves, but other agendas rule from where we know not, hence insult upon injury.

The key to having a rational discussion on Holocaust Denial is to avoid engaging the troll-style deniers on their gotcha points and insist on their providing actual arguments and evidence on the basic issues.

Remember, most of them are doing this primarily because it is FUN to bait people they don't like. If you don't play the game, the ones who don't want to debate the core issues will wander off and annoy someone else.

10,000 posts on one thread are not enough? lol

Holocaust Denial is like the obese claiming they don't eat much.

I'm sorry, but your reply really doesn't address the issues I started this group up to address. In fact, it seems to be assuming the topic of "Why does Holocaust Denial exist", i.e. the explanation of its causes.

Did you have something to say about the structure of deniers arguments and how they fail to win their point?

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[Deleted by Amazon on Oct 2, 2009 1:25 PM PDT]

Alas, the evil denier nutjobs have arrived (John E. Martin). I will no longer track this discussion, since the IHR will not descend upon it with the diatribes, lies, and filth. Too bad: I thought we might have had a good discussion of the "denier methodology."

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While you're at it, ....
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Again, you've mistaken me for someone who really cares about whatever pet peeves you have about Israel. All I can say about what's got your back up is.

It matters less than a fart in a hurricane when the question is: how is that deniers arguments fail to reach their goal?

But to engage in a little dialog on this particular(ly insignificant, when the topic of the group is considered) topic: The israeli supreme court released Demjanjuk because the Israeli *prosecution* had proved to their satisfaction that Demjanjuk was actually a guard at _another_ death camp.

Which still makes him guilty of being a guard at a death camp, now doesn't it?

Now I turn to the subject matter of the group and point out that what you thought was the substance of your response (that how Demjanjuk was treated, how it proved a conspiracy to railroad an innocent, how that fits into the larger claim that the Holocaust is a 'hoax' perpetrated by the evil Joooosssss) is based upon 1. The assumption that _all_ actions of the parties involved are motivated _soley_ by the operation of this grand conspiracy (e.g. your remark about the U.S. DOJ) and 2. abysmal ignorance of the facts of the case (Germany is _not_ trying Demjanjuk for being Treblinka's "Ivan the Terrible" but for being a guard at _Sobibor_, so he is _not_ being tried for what, in your overheated imaginings you terme "the same crimes he was found innocent of because he was not that man and it was proven!") and 3. a thought process nearly impervious to counter-evidence, even when it's implied by your own argument! (e.g. How did Demjanjuk win his appeal in Israel? Through the actions of the Israeli prosecution, that's how!)

But thanks for providing the first instance of a failed denier 'argument' for the group to consider! You've demonstrated several characters I pointed out in my first point: abysmal ignorance, conspiratorial mind-set, unexamined assumptions.

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Like I said: 10,000 posts. Why is that not enough?
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Then, again, I ask: why are you engaging in this conversation?

JEM: << As the Brits say... bullocks! >>

That's bollocks, Jack.

Hello Susanna,

This topic does, indeed, seem to have legs. In reply to your comment about all the math used by deniers, I've never put much store in that.

The estimated death toll has remained within the 5 to 6 million range insofar as I've seen. At Nuremberg in 1945, for example, it was estimated that about 5.7 Jews were murdered in what is now called "the Holocaust." (See Lucy Dawidowizc, WAR AGAINST THE JEWS, p. 402.)

Professor Raul Hilberg, one of the first professional historians to really study the Holocaust, estimated that 5.1 million Jews had been killed. Adolf Eichmann testified in Jerusalem in 1961 that about 6 million Jews were killed in the Holocaust. (Richard Evans, THIRD REICH AT WAR, p. 318).

One of the most authoritative accounts of the Holocaust available today is Professor Saul Friedlander's NAZI GERMANY AND THE JEWS and he estimates that between 5 and 6 million Jews were killed in the Holocaust. (Vol. II, p. 662.)

Some of the deniers tried to project the death tolls from their own estimates of the gas chambers they claimed to have examined. They base their estimates on commercial crematoria in which the ovens are cooled down after each, individual cremation and the remains are recovered. The Nazis, however, used equipment more akin to industrial incinerators which were capable of continuous operations for a longer time and which had a larger capacity. In addition to those, the Nazis improvised "roasters" using steel rails and stone, or concrete, supports which could be operated outside and had very large capacities. All of which throws off the kind of mathematical projections you sometimes see.

There is a lot of eyewitness evidence that is useful. At Auschwitz-Birkenau, for example, accounts by Nazi staff and surviving prisoners reinforce each other about the use of gas chambers to kill prisoners and about the overall procedures. Professional historians have access to a huge amount of archival material also, much of it from the Nazis themselves.

The mathematics of burials are also complex. Most of the dead were burned to a residue of ash and bone fragments. I've read that an average adult's remains could fit into a shoe box. These remains weren't always buried either. Sir Martin Gilbert, a Professor of History at Oxford, found himself in the middle of a greyish field of such material on his first visit to Treblinka. Ashes were buried, scattered around fields and even left in mounds at some sites. Those who seek to deny the Holocaust seem to be the only ones unable to find any trace of human remains. Everybody else sees them scattered all over the landscape at these sites.

Eyewitness evidence is valuable in a court of law, but it has to be used critically. Such witnesses, for example, may not understand what they're looking at or they may be too terrified to remember it accurately. A good lawyer always attacks the credibility of eyewitnesses by demanding increasingly minute details. "What color shirt was he wearing? Did his socks match? Exactly how far from my client were you when you first saw him? etc." Unless you have a photographic memory, you're not going to recall all of that.

I've seen a lot of accounts by Nazis about the Holocaust. Some are quite good, but they almost always minimize their own role in what they're seeing. They'll describe the "selections", the "disrobing of those about to be gassed", even the actual gassing or shooting, but they almost never are clear about what they, themselves, were doing there.

The US Court system is good for criminal offences, but not set up for "crimes against humanity" of the magnitude of the Holocaust. I believe that's why special tribunals were set up after the war ended.

[Deleted by Amazon on Oct 2, 2009 1:57 PM PDT]

[Deleted by Amazon on Oct 2, 2009 1:53 PM PDT]

Hello John E. Martin,

You seem to be a little late checking in. Were you detained beating up a small Jewish schoolchild or did you warm yourself at a book burning?

Actually, I'm happy to see you. You provide a good example of the methodology used by those who seek to deny the Holocaust as a fact of history.

May I ask you to comment on the fact that Professor Saul Friedlander, a Professor of History at UCLA and an acknowledged authority on what we now call the "Holocaust" not only affirms in his book NAZI GERMANY AND THE JEWS (1997 & 2007) that it took place but that it killed between 5 and 6 million innocent, un-armed Jewish men, women and children in addition to about 10 milliion other "enemies of Hitler's Third Reich. And, Professor Friedlander is supported by every other historian in his conclusion that the Holocaust is a fact of history.

How do you dispute the conclusion of one of the foremost authorities of our time, especially when the entire profession of history agrees with him? All the expert testimony is arrayed against you in this proceeding.

ColdShot--

We've been through this once already. I thought I'd convinced you the last time; of course, I will try again. Israel did not sentence Demjanjuk (he was convicted from what I read--I'll dig out the source again--) becuase of a technicality--confusion as to which camp he served at--Treblinda or Sobibor--not whether he was a camp guard. He was certainly not innocent--there are id cards with pics, witnesses, documents, etc. (What do you think Germany will really do? Slap on the wrist?)

Well look who's back!! So about those Auschwitz letters...what do they tell you?

I've been trying to figure that out for a very long time.

How many times have we adduced evidence, only to be told by the deniers (without even a pretence at justification) that it was forged by the "Holocaust conspirators", or extracted by torture, or the wording was meant metaphorically not literally, and so on?

These people are not skeptics: they are cultists who believe (or claim to believe) that they know the truth, and they will summarily dismiss anything that challenges their beliefs. They are a lot like hardcore 9/11 "truthers". Many of them ARE 9/11 truthers, of a specialized sort.

Hello Suetonius,

I agree with your observation about that aspect of the denier method. One book which comes in for a lot of criticism from them because of "torture" is Rudolph Hoess' memoirs of his time as Commandant of Auschwitz-Birkenau Concentration Camp entitled DEATH DEALER.

The denier method contains a grain of truth in this case and I agree with them that it is always wise to read material from those in somebody else's custody critically and objectively. This would be especially true in Hoess' case because Poland was under Soviet domination at the time of his captivity.

The memoir itself, however, doesn't take the Communist Party line that 4 million people were murdered at Auschwitz-Birkenau. He sets the figure much lower at about 1.1 million, in line with modern estimates.

The deniers also fail to mention that much of their information about Hoess' "torture" comes from his memoir. What NKVD officer would allow that in a final draft?

The tone of the memoir sounds German. Hoess emphasizes his commitment to his beloved Fuhrer and stresses that the terrible orders to murder all those people came from him through Himmler.
Hoess brags about getting a medal from Hitler in 1943 for all his hard work as a concentration camp administrator. Hoess whines about being denied the "honor" of serving in combat with the Waffen SS because he was deemed to be "too old."

None of this sounds like Communist dictation to me. Hoess tries to convince the reader that he's personally innocent of murder because he treated the Jewish slave-laborers assigned to his villa humanely and that as an SS Officer, he had to follow orders. "Fuhrer! You command! We obey!"

He observes the selections, the gassings, the shootings, the disposal of the corpses by burial and later incineration and the general evolution of the camp and insofar as can be determined, he does so with a commendable degree of accuracy. He makes mistakes about some dates and other details, but he had no records from which to work. They'd all been destroyed as ordered.

He tries to minimize his own culpability which strengthened my belief that his memoirs are what they purport to be. He goes on at length at how terrible he felt inside and how he had to struggle to maintain his composure and set a proper example for his subordinates.

I always thought Hoess' memoirs were authentic myself. They certainly don't appear to be Soviet fakes. The holographic originals are in the Museum at Auschwitz-Birkenau from what I've read in one of their guidebooks, KL AUSCHWITZ - SEEN BY THE SS. They include pictures of some of the original pages from their collection.

Hi John Lane,

And wasn't it Hoess who complained that his afternoon naps were interupted by the screams of prisoners upon whom horrific "experiments" were performed (Block 11?)?

Sorry to drift off topic, but interestingly enough, I have heard only one denier (guess who) even mention experiments, writing them off as lies.