Sky News - dumb & dumber

'Zyklon' I presume.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/war/genocide/ is a good basic resource. Also the transcripts and evidence in the David Irving libel case are available at http://www.hdot.org/

Paul

 

I find it astoundingly offensive that people can deny the holocaust

 

Yes, sorry. Never use the stuff myself.

 

That woman you quote in the Irving Libel case is herself Jewish! You can hardly call her case unbiased! Irving is a neutral observer. I have a lot of respect for his works, regardless of what the mainstream 'free' press have to say.

As for the response of a university offering me a PHD. I passed a History degree with first class honors. I am no mug. I am an intelligent individual who looks at both sides of an argument rather than just one. I very much doubt all of the people who have criticised me have actually bothered to read any of Prof. McDonald or Irving's work. Most likely is they rely on media sources to tell them the 'truth' about these people's work.

I have studied both pro-holocaust and anti-holocaust literature in a bid to determine the pro's and cons for both sides and come up with an opinion that is actually based on facts. I wonder how many people have done the same.

 

Up until this point this thread has avoiding falling into being a slanging match.

I don't, however, think this will continue much longer.

Saddam - you've made your points. Others have made theirs and clearly neither side is going to move on this issue. I would kindly request that we leave this at this point?

 

The subject of gas chambers has been the source of much debate in academia. My tutors and lecturers (the ones i have questioned about this) seem to think that there was a mass Typhoid epidemic which spread through the camp because of the poor conditions. Indeed documents found at Auschwitz confirm this fact. If you bother yourself, you will find that Zyclon B is the most effective medium of killing lice which spread the disease.

This is the real reason why the inmates hair was shaved, to stop the spread of the lice that caused the Typhoid problem. On other documents recovered, there is evidence of money being spent on medicine to cure Typhoid around 1944. Now, if gas chambers are indeed a reality, why would they spend money on trying to prevent a disease that was wiping them all out anyway?

Once again i must emphasise that i am not denying the holocaust, i am simply asking questions that any self respecting historian would ask. Shockingly, of all the documents recovered from Auschwitz, there were none to suggest any gassings of any sort. Now, if they were really committing 30,000 murders a day (conservative estimate) do you not think that some sort of documentation would have been kept? I would be certainly very surprised if there wasnt. An organised and planned assult like this would have needed some serious planning, yet documents have never been recovered.

One of the most important tools for Historians are historical documents. The lack of any in this case should promt further inquiry, but they dont, because as Julian correctly stated, the holocaust is a sensitive subject.

Now, consider the Jewish led Bolshevik revolution in Russia. 20 million have been proven killed during this brutal regime. This is probably the most sickening mass murder of all time, yet i can freely investigate this event, and i frequently have. As a historian this can only raise scepticism about the Holocaust story.

To clarify, i neither accept nor deny the Holocaust because there is simply not enough academic proof for me to make that judgement. Slander at will.........

 

Fair point, i feel i have lost this particular argument anyway. It is difficult to make people see there is more to just the mainstream idea of things unless they have read the relevent literature.

I guess that after this episode i have no choice but to leave Zerogain. Fair enough, i have not made many posts but have always enjoyed reading other people's opinions and only posted when i felt i had something to offer. No doubt that nobody will miss my presence and i shall still call by to read your interesting points of view. But after causing such controversy on such a sensitive topic (which believe it or not i never intended) it would be the decent thing to do.

I hope the new mods continue the great work as started by Michaelab, I honestly believe that Zerogain is THE place for hifi enthusiasts to meet and discuss issues that are important to their hobby.

So long, farewell and it was nice whilst it lasted :beer:

 

That is your choice and your decision. I nor any of the other moderators are asking you to leave, but simply that this discussion be parted before things turn sour.

 

I respect this and thank you for the tollerance you have shown even though you may disagree with my points (isnt that what discussions are all about anyway). However i feel that any time i ask for advice, or comment on advice, people will take no notice and possibly slander me even more. I never honestly meant to cause any offence to anyone and this was clearly a misjudgement on my part and for that i apologise. That goes to anyone i may have offended or upset in any way.

Zerogain truly is a great place with great people and i wish you all the best. :beer:

 

So?

I think you've exposed yourself here.

FWIW Irving sued Lipstadt for libel and lost. He couldn't show on the balance of probability that he was an honest historian.

The evidence for the Holocaust is over-whelming. The common theme among deniers is an emotional attachment to National Socialism and Hitler coupled with anti-semitism rather than a serious regard for the truth.

It beggars belief that you attained a history degree at a British University. A British University that appears to contain tutors and professors denying the holocaust in private. I'd quite like to know which institution you're supposedly studying at.

Paul

 

what a load of bollocks

i can't do anything else apart from insult you for being an utter prat,so i will bow out of this thread now,

ps your main argument is that there weren't any 'dcouments' supporting th mass murders? What did you think they would do,turn up at Nuremburg and say 'here you are,you may need these?'

 

"That woman you quote in the Irving Libel case is herself Jewish! You can hardly call her case unbiased! Irving is a neutral observer."

The inference being that Jews can't be neutral but a man proven to have pro-Nazi views and sympathies can. Unfotunately, Saddam, this does make me wonder if you have any other 'interesting' opinions about Jews.

Saddam, clearly you choose (for whatever reasons) to believe the 'evidence' that supports your view and dismiss the evidence that does not. At the very least, this makes you a bad historian.

In a British court judgement, Irving was certainly not found neutral: "Irving has for his own ideological reasons persistently and deliberately misrepresented and manipulated historical evidence,"

Further, "He is an active Holocaust denier, anti-Semitic, racist and associates with right-wing extremists who promote neo-Nazism."

 

I'm a bit late here, but this is a subject that interests me and I have read a bit on it. To me, the evidence for a mass slaughter in the Vernichtungslager is undisputable. A very good book on the deniers is "Denying history" by Shermer and Grobman (Univ. of California 2002) - my copy is sitting beside me here on the bookshelf. I became interested in the business when I encountered a Holocaust denier on another website. He tried to quote chemical evidence to show that gassing with Zyklon B couldn't have taken place (the celebrated "staining" argument), and I (honours in chemistry who had worked for a company skilled in cyanide chemistry) and an entomologist (skilled in the use of HCN as a pest exterminator), tore him into little shreds.

The best answer to Holocaust denial is the father of a former secretary of mine, He stood in that queue in Auschwitz with that SS guard pointing. He, a young, fit man, went that way, the rest of his family (nine of them) went that way. He has the great good fortune to be Hungarian, and the Nazis came for the Hungarian Jews late in the war (1944). He survived just under a year of hard labour before the Russians liberated the camp.

Many years later in America (to which he'd emigrated), someone wrote in the local Pittsburgh paper that it hadn't really happened. For the first and only time, he wrote a letter to a newspaper. He was delighted, he wrote, to know that his family really hadn't gone up the chimney at Auschwitz, and could the writer please inform him where he could see them. Strangely, no answer was forthcoming.

Another good read, now back in print, is Sir Martin Gilbert's "Auschwitz and the Allies".

 

Unfortunately, Isaac, it isn't. While the exact figure will never be known, the fact is that the Vernichtungslager in Poland (Auschwitz, Treblinka, Chelmno, Sobibor) accounted for over 4 million Jews and nearly two million other undesirables and Untermenschen - Gypsies, Jehovah's Witnesses, etc.

Saddam is correct in that the current buildings at Auschwitz aren't the originals. The Final Solution was carried out with great secrecy - no written records were kept of the Wannsee Conference in late 1941 when the decision for total extermination was taken, the camps were sited out of Germany, deep in Poland, and the SS sought to destroy all evidence by blowing up the camps and their facilities before the Russians arrived.

I'm currently reading Martin Gilbert's "Auschwitz and the Allies", and I'm at the point where the news is starting to leak out. Much of it came from anti-Nazi businessmen with highly placed contacts, and even access to Hitler himself. An enterprise the size of Auschwitz-Birkenau needed the cooperation of German industry (regretfully, industry fell over itself to help), so the design of gas chambers, crematoria, etc. to handle the anticipated volume of, er, traffic had to be optimised, so that the whole thing would work smoothly. By mid-1942, the Jewish World Congress representative in Geneva had put two and two together - the news of special camps in the East and of experiments with poison gas (not specifically of Jews), coupled with a sudden acceleration of the rate of deportation of Jews from the occupied countries. The news was passed to the US and British Governments immediately, but they didn't believe it because they couldn't verify it. It wasn't until the summer of 1944 that the Allies had incontrovertible proof of what was happening in Auschwitz.

P.S. One interesting aspect is how the top Nazis sought to avoid responsibility for anything. Hitler invented for himself the post of Führer, literally "guide". His idea was to lay down general policies and underlings were invited to "work towards the Führer". This laid the foundation of a gangster regime, in which factions in the Nazi Party fought each other better to "work towards the Führer, while der Führer sat sublimely above it all. Much of the Final Solution was determined by Himmler and his offsider Adolf Eichmann, the Final Solution's time and motion man. Ian Kershaw is especially good on this aspect of the Nazi regime in his magnificent two-volume biography of Hitler.

 

Tones, interesting points well made. Have you read anything by Jurgen Graf? He is an extremely intelligent individual who provides an exellent account of current revisionist debate. His book 'Holocaust or Hoax?' is available to read online at http://www.ety.com/HRP/booksonline/graf/toc.htm

Whilst leaning slightly toward to hoax side, he examines the proof of and against and makes some interesting observations. I think it would be worth a read even if you simply dismiss it. I have also stumbled upon an interview by David Duke (whom i cannot stand) with him in which he makes some interesting arguments. This 1 1/2 hour interview can be downloaded Here and is a reasonable sized file.

 

...and when you say "Whilst leaning slightly toward the hoax side ..."

Yup, I'd say he leans slightly.

Saddam, while stopping short of saying that I wouldn't give you the best advice I could when it comes to hi-fi speakers - my recommendations, as everyone knows are: square or rectangular thin-walled cabinets, multiple drive units to cover the frequency spectrum, complex, passive crossovers - the kindest thing I can say is that you lean just a little yourself and I strongly suspect that this is as the result of being pushed by your university lecturers. Does it ever occur to you that they may have an agenda of their own?

In the interest of truth, wake up.

 

Unsurprisingly I disagree. I believe if there is even the slightest argument there then both sides should be explored. We are not dealing with universal truths here, we know for instance that the world is not flat, this can be scientifically proven. In this case however it cannot be, and along with every other historical event should be investigated till we know more.

I have no agenda against Jews contrary to what you may believe, I just think that further investigation is necessary. If that makes me an anti-semite then so be it. I would suggest you have a listen to the link i gave to the radio interview too and you will see that Graf is a highly respectable individual.

Regards.

 

No, I haven't, but I'll look into it. I personally believe that the Final Solution did indeed take place, but as someone with an interest in history and genuine historical research I respect your stance. The problem is that the subject has become so emotive that rational discussion is difficult. The pitch has been queered by extreme right-wing groups and historians with an axe to grind, such as David Irving. I expect the revisionist voices to get louder as the numbers of survivors who were there and saw it all happen dwindle. Part of the problem is that the Nazis sought to keep the extermination programme as secret as possible, so there was little documentation and the camps were destroyed and most of the survivors force-marched west in freezing weather (where many more died). When the Russians arrived at Auschwitz-Birkenau, they found very few people left.

Much of the right-wing belief, especially in Germany, is fuelled not only by anti-Semitism but also by the belief that Germany should not be held perpetually guilty. I agree with that; this generation has exterminated nobody. In addition, everyone should read a frightening book called "Ordinary Men", the story of Reserve Police Batallion 101 in Poland, and how these middle-aged guys, from a not particularly Nazi part of Germany (Hamburg) and with memories of what Germany was like before 1933, became, with very few exceptions, Jew killers. The message is frightening; the monster is not the exclusive property of the Germans or the Soviets or the Americans in Abu Ghraib - it is within all of us and given the right circumstances it will come out. And failure to grasp this will make it all the more likely to come out. History, as they say, repeats itself, because people don't bother to listen the first time.

 

I second the recommendation of 'Ordinary Men', it is a truly shocking read.