How can anyone believe the Holocaust did not happen?

[Mobius]

This is a concept that I find unconscionable. Does it occur to these neo-nazi types that many of the bodies of the Jews were gassed and then disposed of in huge crematoriums, that there are pictures of? How can you prove the death of a person whose body is no longer there? To say that these deaths didn't happen because there are not 6 million bodies, is simply ludicrous. Or what about the eye witness accounts of survivors and troops liberating the death camps? The thought of any Jewish person having to defend the validity of the Holocaust is completely sickening.

[AmyStrange]

1. the question I am always asked...

is where are the bodies? We're talking about 6 million plus bodies are we not?




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[Mobius]

4. Did you see the part of my post...

about the bodies being disposed of in large crematoriums? What do they say when you tell them that? There aren't many bodies because they were disposed of in a way that completely disintegrated them, and there is MUCH photographic evidence.

[buckeye1]

10. The victims bodies were cremated.

Apparently you have never studied it. There have been many such killings throughout history. The difference here is that it was like a production line. It was industrial genocide. When the Nazis were losing the war,the trains still took the victims to their death. That might tell you where the priority was.

The ghouls killed Gays,500,000 Roma, millions of Soviets and many politicos that they found to be in their way. The Nazis had a whole list of "inferior people". Oh and I forgot the insane and others that were judged infirm.

This is not to mention the war killing. The Nazis never did anything good. Never forget it.

[Mobius]

13. I said the victims bodies were cremated.

How is this not studying it? Did you misunderstand me? I am not trying to marginalize the suffering of any other group of people. I am confused as to what drew you the that conclusion.

[Mobius]

15. the non-Jewish killed were 4 million I believe

The Nazis had blacks, Gays, mentally ill and political opponents on their hate list as well.

[youngred]

27. non-jews were another 6 Million

[Wonk]

2. Why is this in the lounge?

I have every reason to believe that it did happen, but people who pretend like it was the only case of genocide to ever occur in the history of humanity are as equally biased as those who pretend it never happened, imho.

[Mobius]

5. Are you suggesting I think it was the only genocide that ever happened?

I'm a Wesley Clark supporter for goodness sakes. The man that liberated 1.5 million Albanians from ethnic cleansing. This thread is not about whether mass genocide has occurred to other groups or races. It is about people that want to attempt to court belief that Hitler did not kill 6 million Jews.
To address another poster, I am aware of the total fatalities in WWII, however I am addressing the extermination of the Jews here.

[Mobius]

6. also, why should this topic not be in the Lounge?

There are plenty of Gibson/Passion threads that are addressing anti-semitism?

[Wonk]

7. ...

General Discussion Forum
This very popular forum is for discussion of miscellaneous political topics.

The DU Lounge
This forum is for personal/social discussions, vanity posts, and all other non-political topics.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=latest_threads

[Mobius]

8. its a religious topic

i felt i was following the rules. Did you say the same thing in all of the Mel Gibson threads? Or is this an attempt to stifle this thread?(edited to add, I was not aware of your moderator status)

[mobuto]

20. It is not a religious topic

The Holocaust is fact. Unlike religion, it is not open to interpretation. The facts are clear. What you make of them is another story.

[Mobius]

26. They were murdered for their religion

I think that is a religious topic. I also am not interpreting anything. The title thread is about how I find it so completely insane that someone could even try to explain their reasons for believing the Holocaust did not happen. It should not be open to interpretation, but some people try to. How can someone try to discredit something so infamous and overwhelmingly supported with so much evidence? I know I'm a bit naive, but this just isn't something my mind could sink low enough to understand.

[mobuto]

29. I'm not trying to pick a fight, but they weren't

Hitler's attack on Jews was racial, not religious. It had origins in historical religious anti-Semitism, but Hitler was clear to attack the Jewish "race." That meant that Jews were Jews, regardless of whether they practiced Judaism or any other religion. And inter-marriage was forbidden so early precisely because they were afaid of
the nefarious effects of "Jewish" genes on the "Aryan" race.

Those who now deny the Holocaust likewise do so because they're racists, not because of any theological questions.

I really don't know how anyone can deny the HOlocaust either - its just a sign that some people will believe anything or disbelieve anything regardless of the evidence. You remember the old cliched saying of Jonathan Swift's: "There is none so blind as they that won’t see."

[lcordero]

3. 6 million?

Last time that I checked, over 50 million people died because of WW2.

Remember that it wasn't just conflict that killed people in WW2. I consider disease to be a combat kill too so it might have been a lot more than the 50 million.

[mobuto]

22. Not the same

There were no other populations that were so deliberately or methodically exterminated as the Jews, either in the war or at any other point in human history. The number, six million, is so vast we tend to lose perspective (try counting to six million) but the real horror isn't so much with how many died, but with the savage fixation the Germans had of erasing 5000 years of history. It has been said that the Germans were fighting wars on three fronts - against the Allies in the West, the Soviets in the East, and against the Jews in the camps. The shear resources they spent in the effort to kill every Jew they could get their hands on are stunning.

Its in that context that the Holocaust stands as metaphor for the human condition - revealing the horrors of the industrial age, of ideology, of how human ingenuity can be perverted for the ends of ultimate injustice.

I'm not trying to detract from the suffering other groups have experienced, whether they be Roma, homosexuals, Russians, Poles, Communists, Chinese and Koreans under the Japanese, or even Tutsis in Rwanda. But the point needs to be made that the Jewish Holocaust went further.

[Forkboy]

9. Extreme mental retardation

[Mobius]

11. kinda what I was thinking Forkboy

unfortunatly, some of these people seem to posess some higher brain functioning. This is what causes my confusion.

[Dookus]

12. Well....

people will believe almost anything if it supports their prejudices. How do you think the Holocaust occurred in the first place?

[Mobius]

14. best point made so far

thank you

[izzie]

16. Because no one wants to think we could do that to each other.

It is so hard to face what we will do to others that we like to believe it is not true. Does anyone here face what we did to the American Indian? You do not see the Long March read in any school. Ever see a man who beats his wife say he did it? It is so hard to face the fact of what we are.

[MarianJack]

17. A Sickening Thought!

The neo-nazis, skinheads, etc., know that people like my Uncle Joe, who was in a troop that did liberate a concentration camp, are dying at a high rate every day. He died in 1997. Time doesn't stop and the W.W.II generation is old now.

They also know that there are enough lunkheads out there who will believe (as Peter Finch said in "Network") any piece of shit they tell you.

As I said before, my Uncle Joe SAW it! He was a devout Roman Catholic Philly suburbs kid who had probably never seen a Jewish person in his life before going to war. I will always remember him saying that with all of his horror at seeing the condition of the survivors and the "ovens", it was all that he and his men (he was top Sgt. of his outfit)could do to not shoot every German they saw, especially those guards who put on inmate uniforms and tried to mingle with the Jews. Even if the Jews hadn't thrown them out it would have been obvious looking at these healthy, well fed gentiles mixed in with the starving Jews.

My uncle Joe was my mom's brother. My step mother had an Uncle Felix who was a survivor of Treblinka. I met him once when I was 8 in 1963(I'm almost 49). He died a couple of years later. I will always remember that horrible serial number on his forearm.

THIS WAS REAL!

[Hubert Flottz]

18. The same way the same ones believe that, * is telling the truth!

Some people are unbalanced!

[FunBobbyMucha]

19. To answer the original question, I think

it's the same mentality in these neo-Nazis that you see in the Right with their "liberal bias" bullshit. They want to believe what they believe because their hatred fuels them, and they can instantly dismiss information, no matter how copious and thorough, if it disproves their notions of how the world works, and they can shrug it off with "Of course that's what the JEWS/DEMS are gonna tell you."

[TheRedMan]

21. "remove the holocaust and one is left with admiration of Hitler"

Plain and simple, this is motivated by Neo-Nazi trying whitewash history to allow the founder of their "movement" to become a legitimate admirable figure. Truth be told, the Holocaust is the only inherently evil thing Hitler did. While me, (and millions of others) think attacking neighboring countries is reprehensible, especially for little reason better than simple landlust, one can argue about that. There is no possible defense for the Holocaust, save arguing that it did not happen. Therefore, they argue that it did not happen. This ends our tour of the rabbit-hole.

[mobuto]

23. Even without the Holocaust

Hitler was evil.

Literaly enslaving tens of millions of people, destroying thousands of years of culture, replacing thriving democracies with ruthless totalitarianism, murdering his political opponents, using race as a motivating force, even if the Germans had not practiced genocide, theirs would still have been the most evil regime in the history of Europe.

The Holocaust did not begin until 1942. It was over effectively by the end of 1944. The Nazis were in power from 1933 to 1945 - and their evil was manifest throughout.

[Commie Pinko Dirtbag]

24. A smoother, more insidious variant of those

People who try hard as hell to argue that Stalin was MORE evil than Hitler through some creative corpse accounting (never mind the shorter period and smaller population Hitler ruled over, and the unspeakable evil of MASS MURDERING CHILDREN SOLELY BECAUSE OF THEIR ANCESTRY). When arguing with such people, remember that A > B implies B < A. Answer them like that:

"So, you think HITLER was LESS EVIL than Stalin..."

Sounds a lot less nice stated that way, eh?

[geniph]

25. I think the general mindset is that of:

"I am going to ignore evidence of anything that contradicts my preconceived notions."

:puke:

[anti_shrub]

28. I certainly believe it happened

but I believe even the marker at the Auschwitz site had the number killed revised downward, so I think the "offical" total is like 4 million instead of the fabled 6 million.

Not that it makes what happened any better, but on a technicality the "6 million weren't killed" crowd is probably right.