Personally, I think the reality is that there was absolutely genocidal shit going down. But post war is was exaggerated for political reasons. And in the years that followed, the denial of any conversation about the obvious exaggeration has led people to assume it must not have happened at all. Which is the wrong conclusion to make and why it's a terrible idea to not allow people to discuss these topics.
The exaggeration part is pretty obvious in retrospect.
I mean, WW2 era governments had absolutely no qualms whatsoever about lying to their citizens. And a whole lot of those lies have become "history".
For example ... how many people know the myth of The Blitz taught in schools?
And how many people know the reality that roughly half of the brits killed in The Blitz were killed by their own military's artillery fire?
All because the government decided it was better to put on reassuring anti air show (firing naval guns into the sky above a densely populated urban center) that killed its own citizens at random, than to admit that they couldn't really hit German bombers with ground based anti-air fire and watch all their factory workers scatter to the countryside.
I mean, WW2 era governments had absolutely no qualms whatsoever about lying to their citizens. And a whole lot of those lies have become "history".
You can't lie about massive depopulation, particularly of Poland. They're literally fucking gone. 14% of the population was wiped out.
From all that I've seen, I have no idea where there's supposed to be exaggeration. The Soviets initially exaggerated some losses, and so did the East & West Germans, and yet the initial exaggerations have been eliminated in the face of actual evidence. I've had to explain to the HD'ers who claim that "the numbers have never gone down", that the initial deaths at Auschwitz were estimated, improperly, by the Soviets to be 3 million. The camp commandant estimated it was closer to 2.5, then down to 1.8, and our own modern historical investigations suggest it's 1.1.
Look at the Khatyn Massacre, even. It was aggressively pushed as anti-Soviet propaganda, pushed out by Nazis who were always eager to push even completely invented propaganda (they literally started the war in Poland with a false flag attack). However, Khatyn was absolutely real, which made the propaganda even more successful. The Nazis didn't even have to exaggerate very much it because it was so useful as propaganda. They just pushed on it as hard as they could.
I've had to explain to the HD'ers who claim that "the numbers have never gone down"
Case in point, one of the guys in this thread who's apparently using a carefully-curated set of figures posted after the war, yes, but before tallies were updated, to say "Look, no genocide here, guv!"
Personally, I think the reality is that there was absolutely genocidal shit going down. But post war is was exaggerated for political reasons. And in the years that followed, the denial of any conversation about the obvious exaggeration has led people to assume it must not have happened at all. Which is the wrong conclusion to make and why it's a terrible idea to not allow people to discuss these topics.
The exaggeration part is pretty obvious in retrospect.
I mean, WW2 era governments had absolutely no qualms whatsoever about lying to their citizens. And a whole lot of those lies have become "history".
For example ... how many people know the myth of The Blitz taught in schools?
And how many people know the reality that roughly half of the brits killed in The Blitz were killed by their own military's artillery fire?
All because the government decided it was better to put on reassuring anti air show (firing naval guns into the sky above a densely populated urban center) that killed its own citizens at random, than to admit that they couldn't really hit German bombers with ground based anti-air fire and watch all their factory workers scatter to the countryside.
You can't lie about massive depopulation, particularly of Poland. They're literally fucking gone. 14% of the population was wiped out.
From all that I've seen, I have no idea where there's supposed to be exaggeration. The Soviets initially exaggerated some losses, and so did the East & West Germans, and yet the initial exaggerations have been eliminated in the face of actual evidence. I've had to explain to the HD'ers who claim that "the numbers have never gone down", that the initial deaths at Auschwitz were estimated, improperly, by the Soviets to be 3 million. The camp commandant estimated it was closer to 2.5, then down to 1.8, and our own modern historical investigations suggest it's 1.1.
Look at the Khatyn Massacre, even. It was aggressively pushed as anti-Soviet propaganda, pushed out by Nazis who were always eager to push even completely invented propaganda (they literally started the war in Poland with a false flag attack). However, Khatyn was absolutely real, which made the propaganda even more successful. The Nazis didn't even have to exaggerate very much it because it was so useful as propaganda. They just pushed on it as hard as they could.
Case in point, one of the guys in this thread who's apparently using a carefully-curated set of figures posted after the war, yes, but before tallies were updated, to say "Look, no genocide here, guv!"