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On the contrary - the Holocaust is one of the most historically and scientifically proven incidents in history. Not to mention documented by the Nazis themselves who were meticulous record keepers.
Stop falling for the propaganda of the anti-Semites I speak of in the essay... They will always come up with pathetic red herrings and lies (e.g. British decrypts of German Enigma traffic supposedly revealing sympathetic SS leaders!) to lead you astray and deceive you... There are an infinite number of similarly pathetic red herrings of course and once Holocaust deniers are debunked on issue after issue (as they already have been on literally thousands of arguments raised over the decades), they will keep searching for more and more...Why? Because they have an agenda...and it isn't a pretty one.
As I said, if the Jews were not the main victims of the Holocaust nobody would be debating this...
They are easily one of the most hated groups of people in the world and sadly they have been recipients of many other genocides or ethnic cleansings throughout the centuries before the Holocaust.
Now get on the right side of history and stop being so gullible.
James

The right side of history in this instance is what is clearly right or correct or proven beyond belief. The wrong side of history in this instance is ignoring all the proof and instead believing in unfounded rumors spread by anti-Semites.


Case in point = the Nazis.
They thought they had history (and God) on their side.
NEVER FORGET.

None of these additional viewpoints change the fact that a terrible and unjust punishment was meted out to innocent Jews in WW2. But they were not the only victims of that war, in which tens of millions died. Why is THE Holocaust raised to the status of the Holiest of Holies? There is an agenda behind that, and as you say, it is not pretty. It is used to justify the usurpation of Palestine and the ongoing genocide against native peoples in the Middle East. It props up the entire Anglo-Zionist scheme for world domination. Thus you are going to have people inspecting it for weak spots, for a foothold in the battle against the NWO's war on humanity.
We know terrible things happened, even without exaggerating, but exaggeration is still wrong. Not only because it is inaccurate, but because it sets a standard against which new atrocities are measured. New war criminals can always say, well what we are doing is still not as bad as the Holocaust.
This alone makes it worth looking at whether all the deaths were really murders or whether many of them were indirect consequences of a bad policy and the general collapse in Germany as the war turned to defeat.
As for the German staff being kindly and soft-hearted, that is not the implication. They had production targets so they needed workers to stay alive.
Some years ago a film came out called The Patriot, about the US war of independence. In this film, British troops burn down a church, killing the congregation within. The British lodged a protest that no such incident had ever occurred. I found this quite interesting. It shows a number of things. One, that Hollywood exaggerates for sensationalist purposes. Two, are we reflecting the barbarity of our own age back on the 18th century? Has humanity actually gotten worse instead of making progress? And three. this is where I got the idea above, that exaggerating past atrocities lowers the standards. Then Americans can say, Well ok we napalmed some villages in Vietnam, or we cruise missiled some weddings in Afghanistan, but this kind of thing has always happened in war. When in fact, brutality to civilians might be more the exception rather than the rule in history. Until now!

Sorry, but I'm giving it to you straight.
Zionism, the Middle East conflict, Israelis vs. Palestinians, etc, are often brought into the subject of the Holocaust - and wrongly so. Those issues not related at all to an event that happened before (modern) Israel was formed.
Calling it "The Holocaust Industry" is callous.
Think about what you're saying.
Lastly, I have no idealism on this issue - I'm not Jewish, I have no agenda, I have simply researched the Holocaust extensively and am reporting the truth. And my message includes exposing all the usual reasons the ill-informed or anti-Semites try to deny or downgrade the Holocaust.
It happened. Believe it.
There is no debate - again, if these victims were not Jewish, nobody would be trying to challenge history that is 1000% historically and scientifically proven.
And for anyone foolish enough to buy into the anti-Semitic version of the Holocuast (e.g. that it never happened, that it was exaggerated, that people are lying or exaggerating to get money, that there were no gas chambers, etc, etc, yadda, yadda, zzzzzz!) I highly recommend checking out this site which lists all the many points Holocaust deniers and so-called "Revisionists" have been proven wrong over and over and over again: http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Holocaus...
NEVER FORGET!!!
J

The right side of history in this instance is what is clearly right or correct or proven beyo..."
Then the only right thing to do is for the population not to enter into war with their governments and let the president go kill the world himself, since all war is organized crime to sell weapons

If you doubt, take a trip to Germany and Poland and see the labor camps and death camps. See the gas chambers still in existence. During the trial of David Irving, the presence of extensive use of Zyclon B was used in the gas chambers which were destroyed. He was proved to be wrong in his assertations that the Holocaust did not exist. You can still see the blue traces in the gas chamber in Auschwitz.
Visit any of the Holocaust museums around the country and in Jerusalem for the facts.
I am not Jewish; but I have studied WWII and the Holocaust extensively. I am a Museum teacher and was a Regional Educator for the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. I have studied in Germany and Israel, I have visited many of the camps and ghettos in Germany and Poland. I have had over 500 books by various authors on the Holocaust. I have heard personal testimony from a variety of survivors. I have heard many acclaimed historians speak.
The Holocaust did occur and was planned and executed by the Nazi regime. It did include shootings, torture, starvation, working people to death, and gas chambers.

Progressive. ...i challenge you to watch this documentary and come back to this blog and let me know how you feel about the holocaust. ...or if you still don't believe it happened.
https://youtu.be/TV-GhCX0xeE

What do historians think? People trained in historiography, credentialled professors of historical analysis? Is there a controversy about the Holocaust? Not about the facts. No serious historian denies that the Nazis intentionally murdered roughly 5.5 million Jews, and millions of other people, mostly by shooting into pits. Nobody doubts that the Nazis gassed millions of people to death in the Operation Reinhard death camps.
Yes, there are controversies about the Holocaust. But those controversies are about interpretation - not basic facts.
For instance, over the decades, the main controversy was between the intentionalists and the functionalists. The intentionalists think Hitler intended the Final Solution from the beginning. The functionalists think the Final Solution was a contingency made possible by the direction of the war. (This argument now seems to have been solved, and the solution is along the functionalist route.)
The interpretation and lessons we learn from the Holocaust continue to develop, but the events on the ground happened and are not in dispute.

If that is true, then why did Hitler tell a German journalist this way back in 1922 (almost two decades before the WW2 began):
“Once I really am in power, my first and foremost task will be the annihilation of the Jews. As soon as I have the power to do so, I will have gallows built in rows - at the Marienplatz in Munich, for example - as many as traffic allows. Then the Jews will be hanged indiscriminately, and they will remain hanging until they stink; they will hang there as long as the principles of hygiene permit. As soon as they have been untied, the next batch will be strung up, and so on down the line, until the last Jew in Munich has been exterminated. Other cities will follow suit, precisely in this fashion, until all Germany has been completely cleansed of Jews."
—Adolf Hitler, 1922. (Josef Hell, "Aufzeichnung," 1922, ZS 640, p. 5, Institut fuer Zeitgeschichte. http://www.ifz-muenchen.de/archiv/zs/... Translation by the Nizkor Project)
p.s. I could've copied and pasted numerous other similar quotes from Hitler and other senior Nazis made before the war to show exterminating Jews was Hitler's intention from the get-go...

The Holocaust was only possible once Poland was occupied AND Operation Barbarossa had begun. Hence the functionalist argument. Without the preparatory "facts on the ground," the Einsatz operations and Aktion Reinhard would have been impossible.


..."
Sorry, but that's incorrect (sorry to sound like a nit-picker by the way).
The deathtoll of the Holocaust began in 1933, not when the war officially began and Poland was invaded in 1939 - check out the history of the Holocaust and you'll see it is listed as 1933-1945. So in 1933 you have concentration camps already built, you have the ghettoization of Jews (which killed 500,000). The Final Solution had already begun.
I think what you're confusing, if I may say so, is that the Nazis streamlined the method for eradicating Jews once they started invading other countries and the Third Reich took over much of Europe. For example, in 1936, the Soviets began using gas vans on radicals (not Jews, just political revolutionaries). So the Germans then started using gas vans a few years later, before eventually created gas chambers early in the war.
The infamous Dachau concentration camp was built and operational (albeit small-scale) in 1933, by the way.
And as mentioned, there are numerous other quotes by Hitler and others proving the Final Solution (the annihilation of all Jews) was the Nazi's intent long before the war.
On September 17, 2015, USA Today Network’s The Star Press reported on ‘A Voice Among the Silent: The Legacy of James Grover McDonald,’ a new documentary film that confirms it was almost common knowledge in pre-war Germany that Hitler planned to commit genocide.
The report reads, “We’ve all heard plenty about U.S. government officials who turned a blind eye during the Holocaust. But this month, Indiana residents are going to hear the little-known story of one of their own, an American diplomat who did everything he could to warn the world about Hitler, and help rescue European Jewish refugees.”
The article mentions how McDonald was a Catholic from the Midwest with no former interest in Jewish matters. But that all changed when “during a visit to Germany in 1933, he unexpectedly found himself in private conversation with the new chancellor Adolf Hitler — and became the first American to hear the Fuhrer explicitly vow to ‘get rid of the Jews’.”
McDonald then began a mission to meet and warn world leaders of Hitler’s agenda. Those leaders included President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Cardinal Eugenio Marìa Giuseppe Giovanni Pacelli, the future Pope Pius XII. Unfortunately, McDonald’s warnings fell on deaf ears.
The Star Press report continues, “He ran into similar obstacles during his two years (1933-1935) as the League of Nations High Commissioner for Refugees Coming from Germany. During that early phase of the Nazi regime, Hitler was willing to let the Jews leave. The problem, as McDonald discovered, was that no other country was willing to receive them. He resigned as commissioner in 1935 as a protest against the failure of the international community to open its doors.
“Nonetheless, McDonald refused to be deterred. In 1938, he became chairman of the President’s Advisory Committee on Political Refugees. Although its hands were largely tied by the Roosevelt administration’s harsh immigration policy, McDonald and his colleagues did manage to help bring more than 2,000 Jewish refugees to the United States on the eve of the Holocaust.”
What’s interesting about McDonald’s story is it remained unknown to most historians until 2003 when the discovery of missing pages from his diaries revealed exactly what Hitler told him.
As other (previously lost) eyewitness accounts verifying Hitler’s and the Nazis’ detailed plans to annihilate the Jewish people are recovered by historians each passing decade, Holocaust deniers’ attempts to defend the Third Reich against accusations of genocide become more and more feeble. No, make that more and more laughable.
“The discovery of the Jewish virus is one of the greatest revolutions that has taken place in the world. The battle in which we are engaged today is of the same sort as the battle waged, during the last century, by Pasteur and Koch. How many diseases have their origin in the Jewish virus! ... We shall regain our health only be eliminating the Jew.” –Adolf Hitler (quoted in The Racial State: Germany 1933-1945 by Michael Burleigh and Wolfgang Wippermann)

Hitler talks about the lurid things he intends to do to the Jews when he is in power. The very first thing he says he will do is annihilate them.
But this was not possible when Hitler came to power in 1933. In 1934, Hitler was compelled to defeat the SA because it was engaging in unrestrained street violence, and German people preferred the Rule of Law. Hitler pretended he didn't approve of racist violence in order to calm the public down. Fortunately for him, most Germans hadn't read Mein Kampf and didn't know what was in store for the Jews and other National Traitors. Those who had read it tended not to take it at face value.
The Nuremburg Laws were passed in 1935 - two years later. This wasn't the immediate annihilation Hitler promised, or even an ethnic cleansing. It was the purging of Jerws from public life. In order to murder the Jews, Hitler had to lay the legal groundwork first - or kill them somewhere the law didn't apply.
In 1938, Goebbels launched Kristallnacht across Germany. This was a PR disaster for the Nazis. The German population were frightened and destabilised by the outbreak of massive sectarian violence, and Hitler was forced to calm down the violence with another pretence of legalism and decency.
This proved to Hitler that he could NOT carry out the Holocaust in Germany. Only once Poland and the Soviet Union were invaded and their Rule of Law destroyed, could people be exterminated without legal problems.
Therefore, his intention to build rows of gallows in Munich for Bavarian Jews could never be fulfilled. Hitler's prophecy that other German cities would have their OWN gallows would also never come to fulfilment.
Hitler could not built rows of gallows in Germany. But he could in Poland - which is where Operation Reinhard took place. Hitler had to wait until the SS had destroyed the state in Poland, Belarus and Ukraine before situation gallows in Warsaw, Minsk and Kiev. Once he had destroyed the state in the Ostland, he could build as many gallows as he liked.
Here's the quote again:
“Once I really am in power, my first and foremost task will be the annihilation of the Jews. As soon as I have the power to do so, I will have gallows built in rows - at the Marienplatz in Munich, for example - as many as traffic allows. Then the Jews will be hanged indiscriminately, and they will remain hanging until they stink; they will hang there as long as the principles of hygiene permit. As soon as they have been untied, the next batch will be strung up, and so on down the line, until the last Jew in Munich has been exterminated. Other cities will follow suit, precisely in this fashion, until all Germany has been completely cleansed of Jews."

A German Jew stood a 1 in 2 chance of surviving the war. 50% is a horrible probability, but compare the chances of German Jews with the chances of survival where the state was destroyed:
In Poland, almost every Jew was murdered.
A Ukrainian or Belarussian Jew stood about a 1 in 20 chance of surviving the war.
Both the Polish and the Soviet theatres were necessary before the Final Solution could be implemented.

I'd remind you your original statement, which I replied to, was this: For instance, over the decades, the main controversy was between the intentionalists and the functionalists. The intentionalists think Hitler intended the Final Solution from the beginning. The functionalists think the Final Solution was a contingency made possible by the direction of the war. (This argument now seems to have been solved, and the solution is along the functionalist route.)"
So I trust my posts above, including the various quotes from Hitler and those who met Hitler, prove that Hitler was obsessed with annihilating the Jews many, many years before WW2. He conceived the "Endlösung der Judenfrage" ("the final solution to the Jewish Question" in German, I believe) well before the invasion of Poland etc, but didn't have the right methods or manpower etc to conduct it until the war began.
You're correct by the way about your comments that there is no way he could've conducted the Holocaust in Germany (no German concentration camps had gas chambers in them, for example).
So basically, the only issue I have is you saying that Hitler did not INTEND to annihilate all Jews from the beginning - he did and it wasn't an after-thought.
Otherwise, all good - and I'm glad you agree the Holocaust happened exactly as per the history books :)

The Holocaust did not begin in 1933.
I was underlining your original post, but I now realise this was a mistake. It is obvious that you don't actually understand the Holocaust history yourself.
I think you need to actually READ those history books you tell others to read because all I am doing is condensing the actual history for your benefit, from the standard works including Hilberg, Gilbert, Longerich, Friedlander, Browning, Rhodes, Arad, Arendt, etc.
I have read all of the standard works, multiple times, AND the works of Hitler and Rosenberg. I suggest you do the same. This is the canonical history you pretend to know and tell others to learn.
It began on several dates depending on who you read. Some say it began with the Wansee Conference. Other say it began with the first non-mobile gassing of Jews at Chelmno on December 7th 1941. Most historians think it began with Operation Barbarossa.
The intentionalist/functionalist argument was put to bed more than ten years ago.
I am just condensing it for you. But it's in the books. Read them and stop being so pretentious.

Wikipedia:
"The Holocaust, also known as the Shoah, was a genocide in which Adolf Hitler's Nazi Germany and its collaborators killed about six million Jews."
Period: January 30, 1933 – May 8, 1945
Museum of Tolerance (Simon Wiesenthal):
Timeline of the Holocaust: 1933-1945 -- http://motlc.wiesenthal.com/site/pp.a...
The Anti-Defamation League (ADL):
Overview of the Holocaust: 1933–1945 -- http://www.adl.org/assets/pdf/educati...
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum:
First phase of the Holocaust 1933-1938 -- "In 1933, the regime established the first concentration camps, imprisoning its political opponents, homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and others classified as “dangerous.” -- https://www.ushmm.org/learn/timeline-...
World History -- The Holocaust (1933–1945) -- http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A000128...
Myjewishlearning.com:
1933-1939: Early Stages of Persecution -- http://www.myjewishlearning.com/artic...
Also, I know all about the functionalism vs intentionalism debate (which has not been put to bed as you stated). However I was replying to your separate assertion or implication that Hitler definitely did not fully intend the annihilation of the Jews or the Final Solution years before WW2 - which I simply pointed out I perceive history differently. And again, that was possibly a phraseology issue in your original statement, which I pointed out as an attempt to extend an olive branch here (especially given that we both agree on the overall subject: that the Holocaust did happen!)...
Plus, I could have advised you of just as many authors/historians to read on this subject (e.g. authors like Klaus Hildebrand, Peter Kubicek, Andreas Hillgruber, Karl Dietrich Bracher and Lucy Dawidowicz to name but a few) but I wouldn't have been so patronizing to assume what you have and haven't read based off of a few of your online posts...
No ego from my end, but are you sure you don't have one? ;)

Further comment: many people confuse labor camps with slave labor camps. Labor camps were about labor and slave labor camps were about slavery. German labor camps were survivable, as long as you were in reasonable health. Slave labor camps resulted in the death of majority of its inmates and that was their purpose.

Interesting, I actually never paid much attention to the fact that there were two different types of camps.....or at least it never clicked...certain things make more sense now!
I'm glad that part made it into this discussion :)
Emotions are still high 70 years after the end of the war. In another 100 years, historians may take a longer and less partisan perspective.
Currently, it is not easy to get to the bottom of this. Almost all writing on the subject suffers from one-sidedness, emotional appeals, preaching to the choir, a lack of objectivity and a dearth of good, detailed evidence.