Holocaust Deniers

Micheal Shermer’s book , “Why People Believe Weird Things,” is both entertaining and enlightening. One of the books that I am currently, actively, reading, Shermer is the founder and an editor for ‘Skeptic’ magazine, and his book shows it. In it, he explains, and then debunks, topics including pseudoscience, creationism, cults, and holocaust deniers. The one that I chose to write this blog about is the Holocaust denier’s, because 1)I just finished the chapter about 15 minutes ago, and 2) I was fascinated by some of the things that I learned about the Holocaust that I didn’t previously know. Shermer, among other things, is a very well-regarded Holocaust historian, and has been on many shows in which Holocaust deniers lay their claims, and he is there to debunk them.

I feel that this is something that should be critically looked at, and not simply given up as a 'conspiracy theory,' because as long as there are a fairly large number of people who believe in something, it will persist. So instead of simply saying that those people are nuts (Holocaust deniers, 9-11 conspiracy thinkers, etc.), I prefer to look at their arguments and weight them against the counterarguments. So far, the conspiracy theories are nothing more than that, but I like to hear what someone has to say before fully disregarding what they have to say.

Holocaust deniers do not actually deny that the Holocaust happened, this is a media-induced misconception. Also, many of the Holocaust denier’s are not neo-Nazi’s, and many have advanced degrees in history from accredited schools, and other than these views, are well-respected in what they have written. What they do is define the Holocaust differently than history textbooks, and there are three things that they specifically take problem with, of which I will elaborate on each and explain why their views are wrong: 1) There was no Nazi policy to exterminate European Jews, 2) Gas chambers were not used to kill Jews, and 3) between 300,000 and 2 million Jews were killed in ghettos and camps, not the 5-6 million quoted by historians.

1) There was no Nazi policy to exterminate European Jews. They claim that whenever a Nazi spoke of the “Final Solution to the Jews,” what they were actually meaning was that the Nazi’s were going to deport all of the Jews out of the Reich, which they did at the beginning of the war, when they were winning, but towards the end, when they were losing, they were forced to place Jews in camps and ghettos due to lack of funds and manpower.

They defend these points by quoting specific instances, but for the most part they take quotes out of context. They also completely ignore the Nuremburg Trial Confessions, because the defendants were scared for their lives, but whenever a quote comes up they can use, they do not hesitate to do just that. They question the definition of the German word ‘ausrotten,’ which means extermination, but they claim that during the time of WWII, it meant ‘movement,’ even though they are the only ones to accept this.

2) Gas chambers were not used to kill Jews. Instead, the gas chambers were only used for delousing clothes and blankets, and crematoriums were only used to despose of Jews that died of disease and starvation (something they claim is the fault of the allies, because we bombed supply lines) Deniers claim that there were shooting and hangings of Jews, but not from mass gassings.

Documents prove that large amounts of Zyklon-B (the gas used to kill Jews) were ordered to the camps, and there are countless eyewitnesses who verify that the Nazi’s did indeed kill Jews via gas chambers.

3) Only between 300,000 and 2 million Jews were killed in ghettos and camps, not the 5-6 million quoted by historians. Instead, the remaining Jews that are not accounted for at the end of the war, had simply emigrated to other countries.

This one is easy enough to debunk. Approximately 4 million people did not just emigrate with no paper trail, and without them coming out of the woodworks saying they are there. Again, deniers simply pick and choose the information they want to use.

While I do not accept anything that the Holocaust denier’s claim, I feel they do bring up some very valid points that very few of us accept, myself included. At one point, Shermer quotes a denier who uses Orwell’s ‘1984’ ‘Newspeak,’ using this to show how people in today's society can become truly ignorant without fully realizing it. As proof: the Nazi’s never made soap from the fat of Jews’. This is accepted by the Holocaust community, as no bar of soap has ever tested positive for human fat. It is all a myth. And yet I have grown up ‘knowing’ this as fact. Shermer admits this, but I still wanted verification. A brief google search helps to confirm this idea, from reputable sites. And yet I have been told this as truth since I was young. Stepping away from what I currently ‘know,’ (keeping in mind that I do not agree with anything they believe) what if the denier’s were actually right? How would I know? The simple fact is that I never would. I have grown up with an almost ingrained belief in what has happened, that I cannot possibly perceive of any way in which it is wrong. And yet what I was taught was wrong: soap made from the fat of murdered Jews never happened. I had the same overall feeling when I first read ‘1984,’ in which I started to look at things a little differently. I already had an innate skepticism of newspapers and television news programs, but when it comes down to it, does that really matter? So many people watch the news, and take it as the God’s Honest Truth. How many people pick and choose the information they ‘know’ on a day-to-day basis? At what point does history, knowledge, and information cease to be that, and instead turn into a Newspeak invention of doublethink?