Six Reasons
I am not going to argue that "The Holocaust didn't happen." My position is that some of it happened and some of it didn't happen.
Specifically, my thesis is that there were no gas chambers in the Nazi concentration camps. I am going to give six reasons for this:
Why am I surrounded by morons????
Of course the Holocaust happened, in a general sense. The question is how much of it happened. Only an idiot would say "the Holocaust didn't happen." The other side tries to pretend that revisionism is "Holocaust denial." When you say "the Holocaust didn't happen," you are just playing right into their hands, and discrediting revisionism.
Now, to continue what I was saying, here are the six reasons why the gas chamber story is a lie -
1. The physical evidence -- the rooms themselves.
This has to be the starting point. If you could go to Auschwitz and find a room that was obviously a gas chamber, then there would be no such thing as revisionism. That would settle the matter once and for all. The problem is, when you go to Auschwitz and look at the room that is supposed to have been a gas chamber, you find a room that is obviously not a gas chamber. That's why revisionism is possible. That's why revisionism is necessary.
Please click here to see pictures of the
gas chamber at Auschwitz.
The basic fact in the whole subject is that the room
that is supposed to have been a gas chamber isn't a gas
chamber.
If I were teaching Psychology 101, I would use this as a
paradigm case of beliefs governing perceptions. Some people
look at those pictures and see a gas chamber. Others look
at the same pictures and see a morgue. This is like that
experiment where everybody in the room says the red pencil
is longer, and the experimental subject, whose eyes tell
him the green pencil is longer, is afraid to contradict the
group.
My eyes tell me that the green pencil is longer, and I'm
going to say so, even if it's illegal to say it (especially if it's
illegal to say it): the very idea that people were
gassed in that room or any such room is absurd on its
face.
2. The gap in the documentary record.
If there were documents covering the whole sequence of
events, then there would be no such thing as revisionism.
The problem is, the documents one would expect to find do
not exist. We have documents relating to every aspect of
the war, including every aspect of the Holocaust,
except for the gassing of the Jews. It is not
possible to gas six million people, or to do anything else
involving millions of people, without leaving a paper
trail. If the gassing happened, there would be
thousands of documents to verify it, starting with
the planning stages and continuing throughout the course of
events. But no such paper trail exists.
3. The gap in the photographic record.
If there were photographs of the whole sequence of events,
including photographs of piles of corpses in gas chambers,
then there would be no such thing as revisionism. That
would settle the matter immediately. The problem is that no
such pictures exist. We have photographs of every aspect of
World War II, including every aspect of the Holocaust,
except for the gassing of the Jews. There are
photographs of Jews getting off the train at Auschwitz,
photographs of Jews in the camp, and photographs of bodies
in mass graves, but there are no photographs of anyone
being gassed.
To summarize the first three reasons: if we had the same
kind of evidence for the gassing of the Jews that we have
for real historical events (i.e. for events that actually
happened), then everyone would acknowledge that there were
gas chambers, and there would be no such thing as
revisionism.
4. The testimony of witnesses doesn't prove that there were
gas chambers.
There are three points that need to be made about
witnesses.
a. The witnesses are not unanimous. Some witnesses didn't
say anything about gas chambers.
For example, Jan Karski wrote a report in the fall of 1942
in which he stated that he visited the camp at Belzec to
investigate rumors of extermination. He said the Jews were
being killed by electrical shocks in a room with a metallic
floor. In 1944, he published a book in which he said that
the Jews were being loaded into wagons filled with
quicklime and left to die outside the camp. Neither the
article nor the book says anything about gas chambers. Now,
of course, the official history of Belzec says nothing
about electrical shocks or wagons filled with quicklime. We
are supposed to believe that the Jews at Belzec were killed
in gas chambers. But Jan Karski, who was there at the time
(so he says), said nothing about gas chambers.
b. Witness testimony about gas chambers doesn't stand up
under examination.
One of the witnesses who is quoted as an authoritative
source is Dr. Miklos Nyiszli, the supposed author of
Auschwitz, a Doctor's Eyewitness Account. There
really was a Dr. Nyiszli. He was a Hungarian doctor. He was
sent to Birkenau (not Auschwitz), where he worked in the
pathology lab under the infamous Dr. Mengele. After the
war, he testified at the Nuremburg trials. He died in 1949.
The book was published in 1951. Throughout the book, the
author says he was in Auschwitz. He says there were four
crematoria at Auschwitz. In fact, there was one crematorium
at Auschwitz, and four at Birkenau. Obviously anyone who
was there would know that. Anyone who was there would know
which camp was which. At the end (page 206), when they are
evacuating in January of 1945, the author says
We left, filled with the feverish sensation of liberation.
Direction: the Birkenau KZ, two kilometers from the
crematoriums.
Dr. Nyiszli didn't leave Auschwitz and go in the direction
of Birkenau. He was already in Birkenau. This is just the
most glaring impossibility in a book full of
impossibilities. This book was not written by Dr. Nyiszli.
It couldn't have been written by anyone who was there. And
yet this book is cited as one of the most authoritative
witness statements.
If you read only one book about the Holocaust, that book
should be Auschwitz, a Doctor's Eyewitness Account.
Let them give you their best shot. Use your own judgment.
Is this book an eyewitness account, or not?
c. Witnesses by themselves don't prove anything.
Suppose a hundred thousand witnesses claim that something
happened. Does that mean it happened? There are probably a
hundred thousand people who have "seen a UFO" at one time
or another in the last fifty years. Does that mean there
are flying saucers in the sky? There are hundreds of people
who say they have not only seen UFOs, they have been in
them. They have been abducted. They will tell you in vivid
detail about their experience, and they have no obvious
motive for lying. Does that mean it happened?
Go back and look again at the "gas chamber" - if someone
says he saw people being gassed in that room, does that
mean it happened?
5. The fact that standard reference books can't be trusted.
In the summer of 1995, when I was a novice in this subject,
I went to a debate between Michael Shermer, editor of
Skeptic magazine, and Mark Weber, a revisionist. It
was supposed to be a debate, but actually it was what
Michael Shermer calls a "meta-debate." Dr. Shermer tried to
pretend that there was nothing to argue about. However at
one point he did condescend to say something about the
evidence. He said that if anyone really wants to look at
the evidence for the gas chambers, the place to look is
Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death Camp, by Gutman and
Berenbaum, especially the article by Pressac.
It probably never occurred to Dr. Shermer that anyone would
actually read the book, but I did. I searched all over Los
Angeles for this book, and finally found it at the UCLA
bookstore. I read Pressac's article, including the
footnotes. Many of his assertions about gassing are not
documented at all. When Pressac does give footnotes, they
can't be checked out. Most of them are of the form
"Oswiecim, BW 1/19" or "Moscow/October Revolution,
7021-108-32, 46."
However, there is one exception. Pressac says, on page 234,
The first gassing in crematorium IV did not go well. An SS
man, wearing a face mask, had to climb a little ladder to
get to a "window," then open it with one hand and pour in
the Zyklon B with the other. This acrobatic routine had to
be repeated six times. When the gas-tight doors were opened
to evacuate the gas, it was noticed that the natural
aeration was ineffective; a door had to be cut immediately
into the north corridor to get an air current flowing.
[143]
The footnote for this paragraph is:
143. Auschwitz Album (New York, 1980), photo 112.
This can be checked out. The Auschwitz Album is out
of print and hard to find, but at least one doesn't have to
go to Poland or Russia. Eventually I found a copy in a
library, and eagerly looked up photo 112. This photo has
nothing to do with the paragraph quoted above. In fact,
none of the photographs in the Auschwitz Album has
anything to do with that paragraph.
In other words, the only footnote I was able to check
turned out to be bogus.
As far as I know, the Auschwitz Album is not
available online. (Since writing this I have discovered
that part of it is available here.) I'm not going to scan photo 112
and post it here. This is left as an exercise for the
reader. Do you care if the gas chamber story is true? How
much do you care? Enough to go to the library and check out
footnotes? What Michael Shermer is counting on is that
almost no one will do this.
What I'm counting on is that a few people will. It
only takes a few, in the beginning. At every university, I
hope at least one student or professor will care enough
about academic honesty to look up photo 112, and then will
have enough courage to speak up. Make no mistake, it does
take courage. Consider what
happened to David Cole and other revisionists.
More information about Pressac and his footnotes can be
found on the Dead Footnote
page. I have added some new and somewhat ironic comments
to this page in October of 2004. It's not as simple as I
thought.
6. The fact that Hitler declared his intentions openly, and
the Nazis committed atrocities openly.
Conventional historians account for the lack of photographs
and documents by claiming that the Holocaust was so secret
that no photographs were ever taken, and no incriminating
documents were allowed to exist. This is supposed to have
been true even when the Final Solution was in the planning
stages, as far back as 1941.
Hitler talked about exterminating or annihilating the Jews
on many occasions. For example, here is a sentence from
Mein
Kampf. (This is from page 338 of the
Houghton-Mifflin hardback edition. Other references to
extermination may be found on pages 169 and 679.) Hitler
wrote,
The nationalization of our masses will succeed only when,
aside from all the positive struggle for the soul of our
people, their international poisoners are exterminated.
We are supposed to believe that Hitler announced to the
world that the Jews would be annihilated, and at the same
time went to great lengths to maintain the pretense that
they were not being annihilated. The intention was declared
openly, but the act itself was so secret that the Nazis
never even discussed it among themselves. This is nonsense.
On page 679 he said this:
If at the beginning of the War and during the War twelve or
fifteen thousand of these Hebrew corrupters of the people
had been held under poison gas, as happened to hundreds of
thousands of our very best German workers in the field, the
sacrifice of millions at the front would not have been in
vain. On the contrary: twelve thousand scoundrels
eliminated in time might have saved the lives of millions
of Germans, valuable for the future.
At that point the "secret" was already out. Having broached
the idea of gassing the Jews in Mein Kampf, it would
make no sense for Hitler to pretend it wasn't happening, if
he actually did it. But there is no other reference to
gassing in anything else he ever said or wrote. We have
voluminous records of everything Hitler, Himmler, and the
other Nazis said in public, and much of what they said in
private, and there is no mention of gassing anywhere, even
on occasions when they were talking about getting rid of
the Jews.
We have a transcript of a speech (the Poznan speech) in
which Himmler addressed a private meeting of the senior
officers of the SS. Even if he didn't want to mention
gassing publicly, he would feel free to speak plainly at a
private meeting of the SS. (He would have to speak
plainly at some point. They would have to discuss it among
themselves. You can't do anything without saying what you
are doing.) But he said nothing about gassing, even
though he was talking about sending the Jews to
concentration camps. He did not say "I am now referring to
the gassing of the Jews, to the Ausrottung of the
Jewish people." On the contrary. What Himmler said was,
I am now referring to the evacuation of the Jews, to the
Ausrottung of the Jewish people.
In another private meeting (in 1941), Hans Frank mentioned
the idea of killing the Jews with poison gas, only to
dismiss it:
We cannot shoot these 3.5 million Jews, nor can we poison
them, yet we will have to take measures which will somehow
lead to the goal of annihilation...
Even at the Wannsee conference, nothing was said about
gassing.
In 1941, the Nazis were winning the war. War crimes trials
were the last thing on anybody's mind. (In fact there was
no such concept until 1945. War crimes trials had not been
a standard part of wars in the past.) The Nazis had no
reason to create an illusion for posterity. They thought
they were going to be posterity. They thought they
would never answer to anybody for what they did. And yet we
are supposed to believe that even in 1941 they were looking
ahead to a postwar era in which it would be necessary to
cover up their actions.
The Nazis were not shy about killing people. They committed
atrocities openly. They flaunted it. We have pictures of
Nazi soldiers shooting Jews in cold blood and laughing
about it. These pictures were not taken surreptitiously by
someone else, they were taken by the Nazis themselves. But
we are supposed to believe that the gas chambers were so
secret that no photographs were ever taken.
We are also supposed to believe that it would be
possible to cover up an action involving six million
people.
The gassing scenario is supposed to have gone like this: a
trainload of Jews arrives at Auschwitz. They are separated
into two groups, those who are fit for labor and those who
are not. The latter group is taken to the crematorium right
then. First they go to the undressing room, where they take
off their clothes. Then they are led into another room,
which is supposed be a shower room, or a delousing room.
When they are in that room, they are locked in and gassed.
A few minutes later the guards go in and drag the bodies
out and take them to the ovens to be cremated.
If six million Jews were gassed, this scenario must have
been repeated thousands of times. Do the math. This must
have happened at least twelve thousand times, at several
different camps, over a period of several years. This
macabre scene is something a photographer would give his
right arm for, especially since naked women were involved.
But supposedly it was forbidden to take photos, so no
photos were ever taken. This is nonsense. Prison guards are
a law unto themselves. You can't stop them from taking
pictures. Ask Lynndie
England - and her many fans and imitators who think it's all a big joke. Gallows humor existed in 1943 just as much as it does in 2004.
If the gassing scenario happened at all, let alone
thousands of times, there would be photographs. But there
are none.
There are no photographs of anyone being gassed because
nobody was gassed.
Summing up
Arthur Butz is one of the great pioneers in this subject.
He made the essential point that this has to be a simple
thing.
If you are considering the question whether there is an
elephant in your basement, you don't have to go down there
and look around with a magnifying glass. You don't have to
construct a long, involved argument to settle the question.
If the elephant is there, he is obviously there, and if he
is not there, he is obviously not there.
Likewise, the question of whether six million Jews were
gassed cannot be an obscure question. It has to be obvious,
one way or the other. That's why I began my argument with
the physical evidence, the rooms themselves. Once you see
that the room isn't a gas chamber, everything else falls
into place. Of course there is no documentation of
gas chambers. How could there be? Of course there
are no photographs of anyone being gassed. How could there
be? It's not a gas chamber!
The very idea that anyone was gassed
in this room or any such room
is absurd on its face.
That's the end of the six reasons argument. There are a few
more things that should be discussed.
Women and children in the camps
There is another reason that I originally included in my
list of reasons, but I removed it because strictly speaking
it doesn't bear directly on the gas chamber question.
However it is something that I have not seen mentioned
elsewhere, and if you widen the context of the discussion
just a little, it is relevant.
I am referring to the fact that women and children lived in
the concentration camps. Anne Frank is the most famous
example. The standard story that we are all supposed to
believe is that when the Jews disembarked from the train,
they were sorted into two groups, and the ones who were not
fit for labor were taken to the gas chambers, immediately.
How then could a little girl spend two months in Auschwitz,
and five months in Bergen-Belsen? She finally died of
typhus in March of 1945. Why wasn't she gassed in the
summer of 1944, as soon as she arrived at Auschwitz?
I recently found another example. This article is not about the concentration
camps per se. It is about a woman who is trying to
get the Czech authorities to acknowledge her father as a
resistance fighter. The camps are mentioned in passing:
After the outbreak of the Second World War Jiøina
Urbanová's parents joined the antifascist resistance
movement. Ema Faitová worked in Nation Revival for
the famous combat unit Morávek - Balabán -
Masín. The Gestapo seized both of them in the
beginning of the year 1943. Father was executed by the
fascists in Flossenburg in February 1945 and Mother went
through the camps in Auschwitz, Birkenau, Ravensbruck and
Neustadt-Gleve. Jiøina being 4 years old together
with her 7-year-old brother went into an orphanage... Both
the children met their mother only after the war.
Here you have a woman who went through four camps,
including two of the "extermination camps." She spent two
years in these camps and survived.
On the Scrapbook site (reference given below), the same
phenomenon is mentioned:
When the size of the Birkenau camp is quoted as a mile long
by a mile and a half wide, this measurement includes the
security area around the camp and the Mexico section; the
actual area where the prisoners lived is not that large.
Still, I heard one survivor say that she lived in the camp
for two years and never found out the location of the
latrine. Another survivor who lived there as a child said
that she never saw her father the whole time she was in the
camp, although he was also a prisoner there.
This by itself does not imply that there were no gas
chambers, but it does imply that Jews were not routinely
exterminated in the Nazi concentration camps.
The following paragraphs are from an article by Mark Weber,
"Pages from the Auschwitz Death Registry Volumes"
(reference given below).
Consistent with the Sterbebuch records, other German
wartime documents show that a very high percentage of the
Jewish inmates at Auschwitz were not able to work, and were
nevertheless not killed.
For example, an internal German telex message dated
September 4, 1943, from the chief of the Labor Allocation
department of the SS Economic and Administrative Main
Office (WVHA), reported that of 25,000 Jewish inmates in
Auschwitz, only 3,581 were able to work. All of the
remaining Jewish inmates -- some 21,500, or about 86
percent -- were unable to work.
This is also confirmed in a secret report dated April 5,
1944, on "security measures in Auschwitz" by Oswald Pohl,
head of the WVHA agency responsible for the concentration
camp system, to SS chief Heinrich Himmler. Pohl reported
that there was a total of 67,000 inmates in the Auschwitz
camp complex, of whom 18,000 were hospitalized or disabled.
In the Auschwitz II camp (Birkenau), supposedly the main
extermination center, there were 36,000 inmates, mostly
female, of whom "approximately 15,000 are unable to work."
The Six Million question
Revisionists argue that the number of Jews who died in the
camps was much less than six million. Unlike the question
of whether six million Jews were gassed, the question of
whether six million Jews disappeared is far from
obvious. There is nothing simple about it. You would have
to know how many Jews were in Europe (especially Poland)
before the war, and how many were left after the war.
Reliable statistics are hard to come by. The revisionists
say that a lot of Jews had already gotten out of Poland
before the war, and many others migrated to the Soviet
Union, America, Israel, and various other places during and
after the war.
I'm not going to discuss this question in detail here. The
only point I want to make is that the number of Jews who
were killed implies nothing about how they were
killed. It's a separate issue which doesn't affect my point
about gas chambers.
Suppose six million Jews died in the Nazi concentration
camps. This would not imply that they were gassed. In the
Soviet Union, the communists killed tens of millions of
people. They didn't have gas chambers in the communist
concentration camps, but that didn't stop them from killing
millions of people. There are lots of ways to kill people.
Starvation, exposure, disease, and bullets, to name a few.
On the other hand, suppose the Revisionists are right, and
only one million Jews (or even less than a million) died in
the Nazi camps. What would this imply about gas chambers?
It wouldn't imply anything one way or the other.
Idolatry
We have nothing to gain by denying anything. I despise the
whole concept of "denial." We have absolutely nothing to
gain by pretending that Nazi Germany was not what it was,
or by pretending that anything is not what it is.
This also applies to the Jews. They have nothing to gain by
lying. I think the Jews will eventually realize that the
gas chamber lie is hurting their own cause, and they will
abandon it. I don't know how they will manage this, since
they have painted themselves into a corner that's going to
be very difficult to get out of, but they will find a way.
They have to find a way. Their position is untenable. If
they persist with what they are doing, there is going to be
a huge backlash.
They may not care about the backlash, but they should care
about the effect lies have on their own minds. It's almost
impossible to keep repeating a lie over and over for 50+
years without believing it yourself. If they believe their
own lies, and no longer care about staying in touch with
reality, then they are in more trouble than they know. They
have given up their best weapon.
Who may ascend the hill of the Lord?
Who may stand in his holy place?
He who has clean hands and a pure heart,
Who does not lift up his soul to an idol,
Or swear by what is false.
He will receive blessing from the Lord
And vindication from God his Saviour.
...
A false witness will not go unpunished,
And he who pours out lies will perish.
This isn't just empty moralizing. It's literally true.
Idolatry means taking something to be real that isn't real.
One of the basic ideas of the Old Testament is that
idolatry is self-defeating. "Blessing" and "vindication"
mean victory on the battlefield (among other things). The
way to win battles is to see reality more clearly than your
opponent.
This page is meant to be read with its companion pages:
Reply to Michael Shermer: A
Logical Analysis of "Proving the Holocaust" -- This is
a long article about the methodology of revisionism and
anti-revisionism. Michael Shermer, publisher of
Skeptic magazine, says the gas chambers can be
proved with a "jumping together" argument. The
epistemological question is whether a "jumping together"
argument can ever be a valid proof of anything. This is a
philosophical point that may be of interest even to those
who have not read Michael Shermer's article.
Reply to Michael Shermer, the
short version -- an examination of his 18 bits of
evidence.
The Dead Footnote Society
-- This page has further discussion of Pressac's footnotes.
If you are one of those rare individuals who looks things
up, and you would like to meet others in that select group,
you might want to join the Dead Footnote Society.
Political agendas of
revisionists and anti-revisionists
Loose ends: what remains to be
done to nail this down
Other pages on this site:
Ministry of Illusion - Review of a series of films from the Third Reich
The Sanskrit Story and the Third
Wave - a revisionist look at Ron Jones's "Third Wave"
experiment in Palo Alto, California. I argue that the story
is not what it purports to be. The Third Wave didn't happen
the way Ron Jones described it. It has some basis in fact,
but most of it is fiction. It's a fable, intended to make a
political point. However, it's not presented as a
fable. It's supposed to be historical fact. It isn't.
What is National Socialism - a page which puts this subject into its proper context.
The Untouchables Page - 9/11 and what can be done about it - HOW can we take our country back? It can't be done by setting up a confrontation between the people and the government. Change has to start within the government. I'm not talking about a coup. What I have in mind is to set the wheels of the law in motion. That is the only thing that could possibly work.
External links:
What I have tried to do on this page is lay out the basic
logic of revisionism in its simplest form, so you can get
an overview of it. There are actually many other reasons
for questioning the gas chamber story. Here are some links
for readers who want to pursue the subject in more detail.
The Scrapbook site -- a tour of Poland,
including Auschwitz. This is not a revisionist site. I'm
just including it for background. The author occasionally
makes skeptical remarks, but for the most part he just
tells you what the tour guides told him, so this is almost
like being there and taking the standard tour that visitors
get when they go to Auschwitz and the other camps.
And now, some revisionist links:
Samuel Crowell,
The Gas Chamber of Sherlock Holmes - An Attempt at a
Literary Analysis of the Holocaust Gassing Claim
"Samuel Crowell" is a pseudonym. The author appears to be
a mainstream professor (not a professional revisionist) who
doesn't want to use his real name. "The Gas Chamber of
Sherlock Holmes" is probably the most important revisionist
document on the internet. As of January 2005 the CODOH
site is back online, and naturally this was one of the first documents restored to the new site.
"One third of the Holocaust" - Videos that examine the Holocaust in detail. The first episode gets off to a slow start - the narrator's comments about the newspaper are silly - but be patient. It gets better after the first couple of minutes. Check out Episode #28 in particular, about Eichmann's confession.
Carlo Mattogno, The Myth
of the Extermination of the Jews: Part I
Germar Rudolf, The Rudolf
Report
Greg Raven, Rebutting
the anti-revisionists' "best evidence" for the existence of
Nazi "gas chambers"
Mark Weber's testimony in the Zündel Trial
1. overview
2. details
Mark Weber, Pages from
the Auschwitz Death Registry Volumes
Arthur Butz,
Context and Perspective in the 'Holocaust' Controversy
William Halvorsen, review of
The Holocaust in American Life by Peter Novick
Samuel Crowell,
review of The Case for Auschwitz: Evidence from the
Irving Trial, by Robert Van Pelt
Nick Herbert (author of Quantum Reality), Why I
admire David Irving
Note added December 10, 2003
Here is an example of the level on which this page is
discussed. I get a report from my ISP which tells me, among
other things, where my visitors are coming from. I noticed
I was getting visitors from www.livejournal.com and I decided to
investigate. The following paragraph is what I found. It
was posted by somebody who calls himself jihad_al_nafs (his
real name is Chris, and he later changed his livejournal name to "hyperform"):
I don't think i've ever even read anywhere that anybody
claims that auschwitz was used for gassing... The whole
argument is strange to me. Apparently it's a popular thing
for holocaust deniers to hold on to, I did a search and
basically everything that came up with auschwitz and
gassing were people talking about how it couldn't have
happened, or at least how it couldn't have happened like
"history claims." Auschwitz was a work camp. They employed
the jews to assemble weapons and process rubber. It wasn't
an extermination camp. In fact, it was decided early on
that gas was just too messy and difficult to deal with for
any of the camps to adopt it. It's not to say that people
weren't gassed at some of the extermination camps like
Dachau or Buchenwald; I've stood inside of Dachau and
Buchenwald, they definately had sealed facilities for
gassing, I saw them with my own eyes. I wish people would
stop writing all this reactionary literature and just let
the history and the photographs speak for themselves. If
you read anything about the holocaust, you'll find that
gassing wasn't very common. Shootings, starvations, and
burial alive were more common.
This is TRULY BIZARRE.
Yes, children, just about everybody claims that Auschwitz
was used for gassing. If you go to the library (it's that
big building with a lot of bookcases, usually near the
center of campus) and read any mainstream history
book about the Second World War, it will tell you that six
million Jews were killed, most of them by gassing. That has
been the official story for more than fifty years, and it
still is. In some countries you could be arrested for
questioning it. Auschwitz is the most famous of the
so-called "extermination camps" where the gassing
supposedly took place.
When I wrote this page, I assumed that my readers would at
least know what the argument is about. It never occurred to
me that the page would be read by people who don't even
know that Jews were supposed to have been gassed at
Auschwitz. "I don't think i've ever even read anywhere that
anybody claims that auschwitz was used for gassing..." I
really don't know what to make of this.
I keep hearing things about today's students, like they
can't locate the Pacific Ocean on a map (even if they live
at the beach), so I guess I shouldn't be too surprised, but
I am still astonished when I encounter this degree of
ignorance. It reminds me of
The World According to Student Bloopers.
I just hope they aren't all like that.
But wait a minute. There is something about this that gives
me pause. He says
I did a search and basically everything that came up with
auschwitz and gassing were people talking about how it
couldn't have happened, or at least how it couldn't have
happened like "history claims."
So the revisionists have won, as far as the internet is
concerned, and therefore we have won as far as today's
students are concerned. When you do a search for Auschwitz
and gassing, you find revisionist sites that explain why
the official story is wrong. And since today's students
live on the internet and seldom set foot in a library,
that's the reality they live in. Chris has never read
anything to the effect that millions of Jews were gassed at
Auschwitz and the other concentration camps, because he
doesn't read books, he only reads websites.
Maybe we have won, in that sense, but I'm not happy about
it. It's a Pyrrhic victory. We have gained the point about
the gas chambers but lost the much more important point
about looking things up. In this particular case, books may
lead you astray, and the internet will give you information
that can't be found in most libraries. But that's not
always true. I don't want students to believe that there
were no gas chambers because that's what "comes up" when
you "do a search." It shouldn't be a matter of belief, it
should be a matter of logic and evidence -- and looking up
footnotes, which can only be done in a library.
What really bothers me about this is that if the kids who
participate in "livejournal" are any indication, historical
memory is very, very short. It's not just Chris. When he
said "In fact, it was decided early on that gas was just
too messy and difficult to deal with for any of the camps
to adopt it... If you read anything about the holocaust,
you'll find that gassing wasn't very common," his friends didn't know enough to challenge
these preposterous statements. A couple of them
offered hesitant demurrals, but they weren't confident
enough to tell him flatly that he doesn't know what he's
talking about.
I guess it's possible that this isn't a fair sample. Maybe
you have to be an idiot to participate in the livejournal
discussion. But I'm afraid not. Clearly some of them are
idiots, but I think most of them are typical college
students. If they are typical, then most of today's
students (in America, at least) have only the dimmest
recollection of the most famous event of the 20th century.
If memories are really that short, then all the knowledge
stored in libraries is no more permanent than a pile of
leaves on a windy day.
As I said above, I hope they aren't all like that -- and in
fact I know they aren't. Like any generation, this one
includes the whole range from monkeys to scholars. A few
students read the reply to
Michael Shermer all the way through and look up photo 112. It only takes a
few, in the beginning. Eventually they will restore the
integrity of the history profession. It's not going to be
easy, but it can be done.
For readers who are not familiar with the the canonical
Auschwitz story, here are some links. They aren't that hard
to find. I don't know why Chris and his friends couldn't
find them. Nor do I know how anybody manages to finish high
school without learning about this.
The
Holocaust Memorial Center -- "The Holocaust (also
called Shoah in Hebrew) refers to the period from January
30, 1933, when Hitler became chancellor of Germany, to May
8, 1945 (V-E Day), when the war in Europe ended. During
this time, Jews in Europe were subjected to progressively
harsh persecution that ultimately led to the murder of
6,000,000 Jews (1.5 million of these being children) and
the destruction of 5,000 Jewish communities... While the
Nazis murdered other national and ethnic groups, such as a
number of Soviet prisoners of war, Polish intellectuals,
and gypsies, only the Jews were marked for systematic and
total annihilation. In the famed Nazi use of euphemism,
they were marked for "Special Treatment"
(Sonderbehandlung). "Special Treatment" meant that Jewish
men, women, and children were to be methodically killed
with poisonous gas."
Auschwitz-Birkenau
Memorial and Museum -- "The majority of the Jewish men,
women and children deported to Auschwitz were sent to their
deaths in the Birkenau gas chambers immediately after
arrival."
Zipple.com -- The Jewish Supersite -- Concentration
Camps
Fritjof Meyer,
"The Number of Victims of Auschwitz - New Findings Through
New Archival Discoveries"
Links to photographs of gas chambers in other camps
"After all every sort of shouting is a transitory
thing.
It is the grim silence of facts that remains."
-- Joseph Conrad
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