Holocaust+Denial+and+Proof

Three main claims… 1. It did not happen. 2. It did happen, but not like that. · Many scholars have debated the figure of six million and fixed the number of Jewish victims at only a few hundred thousand. 3. It happened but ‘Holocaust’ = bad name. Rebuttal to points given: · The numbers are no exaggeration- one does not need to exaggerate 6 mil to see the gravity of a situation. Israel has our alliance and support because they deserve it, not because they spread myths! · The concentration of HCN necessary to cause death is nearly 200 times lower than that necessary to cause an explosion. · Extermination chambers were forcibly ventilated. Fifteen minutes was ample time to replace the air after a gassing. · Many died in other death camps, in the ghettos and in occupied Soviet territory- not all deaths were from gassing. Evidence: · Written documents —hundreds of thousands of letters, memos, blueprints, orders, bills, speeches, articles, memoirs, and confessions, including numerous reports written by the Nazis about the orders and number of Jews killed, records of [|train] shipments of [|Jews] to the camps, orders for tons of [|cyanide] and other [|poisons] · Eyewitness testimony —accounts from survivors, Jewish [|Sonderkommandos] (who were forced to help load bodies from the gas chambers into the crematoria in exchange for the promise of survival), [|SS] guards, commandants, local townspeople, and even high-ranking Nazis who spoke openly about the mass murder of the Jews · Photographs —including official military and press photographs, civilian photographs, secret photographs taken by survivors, aerial photographs, German and Allied film footage, unofficial photographs taken by the German military · The camps themselves —concentration camps, work camps, and [|extermination camps] that still exist in varying degrees of originality and reconstruction. · Inferential evidence —population demographics, reconstructed from the pre-World War II era; if six million Jews were not killed, what happened to them all? · Bodies: Many thousands of not yet decomposed bodies were found in [|mass graves] near facilities that were indisputably [|concentration camps].
 * __ The Holocaust __**** … ** (just in case you weren’t convinced)
 * __ To Discredit it: __**
 * Stories of the Holocaust were a myth initially created by the [|Allies of World War II] to demonize Germans. Jews spread this myth as part of a grander plot intended to enable the creation of a Jewish homeland in [|Palestine], and in order to gain the solidarity of international public opinion with Zionism. (to garner continuing support for the state of [|Israel] )
 * The Nazis had no official policy or intention of exterminating Jews
 * Nazis did not use [|gas chambers] to mass murder Jews
 * Documentary evidence of the Holocaust, from photographs to the [|Diary of Anne Frank], is fabricated
 * Survivor testimonies are filled with errors and inconsistencies, and are thus unreliable
 * Nazi confessions of war crimes were extracted through torture, thus unreliable
 * More specific evidence:
 * Credibility: Willis Carto founded [|Institute for Historical Review] (IHR), dedicated to keeping history acurate, and it says that the Holocaust was a hoax
 * Judging by the amount and area of the gas chambers, and the number of the Kremas, it was impossible to kill 6 million people in the time interval in which the concentration camps existed
 * Zyklon B could not have been used for killing in the gas chambers, because it is explosive, and the furnaces were nearby all the “gassing chambers”
 * I t would take 20 hours to air a room which was disinfected with Zyklon-B, and therefore the eyewitnesses saying bodies were gasses and carried out 20-30 min later is impossible- they and the carriers would have died.
 * Some parts of the Middle East- especially Hamas agree with these arguments, calling the Holocaust a hoax.
 * Use some points from above
 * The figure of 5 to 7 million Jewish deaths is a gross exaggeration, and the actual number is an [|order of magnitude] lower
 * The Nazi treatment of Jews was no different from what the [|Allies] did to their enemies in World War II.
 * Middle East: “I t is true the Holocaust has taken place, but the Palestinians should not have to pay the price.”
 * Middle East: “I t is true the Holocaust has taken place, but the Palestinians should not have to pay the price.”
 * Reject the religious [|connotation] associated with the term [|Holocaust] . We do not deny the murder of innocent people, but instead reject the name given to the act.
 * The term holocaust originally derived from the Greek word holókauston, meaning a "completely (holos) burnt (kaustos)" [|sacrificial offering] to a god. The majority of scholars define the Holocaust as a genocide of [|European Jewry] alone and do not include the mass murders of other groups as part of the "holocaust"
 * Who are we to glorify the oppression of the Jews and forget about all the other people targeted and exterminated? That’s discrimination!
 * This discrimination and disproportionate view is because Jews have exaggerated and used the ‘ Holocaust’ to get nations to give them sympathy and a blank check to commit their own atrocities.
 * __To Prove it:__ **
 * ( ** Many scholars refuse to engage Holocaust deniers or their arguments at all, feeling that in so doing they would give Holocaust deniers unwarranted legitimacy)