What are you going to argue, hydrogen cyanide doesn't lead to cyanide poisoning?

Whatever "original claim"? Concentration camp was always the official name. Extermination camp was the unofficial name, the whole operation was secret. The official purpose was these were just transit camps in the "resettlement to the East". They were also told they were being sent to work.

The reason why Poland, besides the place that had most Jews in the world so logistic side was obvious, was that Poland (like I just mentioned in https://kotakuinaction2.win/p/12jJUaaUH1/x/c/4JAfAZNrtzc) just didn't exist at all anymore, and so it was a "black hole" where neither German nor any other laws applied.

(Actually the Americans later used a similar logic to set up the X-Ray Camp not anywhere on the American soil but at Guantanamo Bay in a legal loophole.)

In the USSR they needed no camps to rid of the Jews because they just either shot them or instigated the locals to pogroms. But they took many of the Soviet POWs to Poland in order to to kill them, including at the newly build Birkenau Camp that later became Auschwitz II (http://auschwitz.org/en/history/categories-of-prisoners/soviet-pows/).

They claim that 1.1 million people were killed in gas chambers by using a pellet based insecticide.

No, they claim that 1.1 million people died at Auschwitz during the entirety of it's operation, in total. Gas Chambers, shootings, starvation, disease, etc.

Obviously the Soviet numbers aren't reliable, the did some 'back of the envelope' math and didn't even bother to consider maintenance windows, which is why the Camp Commandant of Auschwitz had to correct them at Nuremberg in his own trial.

Where are the piles of bodies, the ashes?

Where's all the ash from my fire place?

I have a chimney. That's where a portion of it goes. The hotter I burn it, the less ash will be left over. For the remainder that I do have, I can literally just toss it out as fertilizer. Steel nails and all. The ash will get absorbed relatively quickly, and dispersed very easily.

I've been burning wood for decades. There are no visible ash piles anywhere on my property, good lord, why would there be. It snows and rains and ash is light.

If I really cared and wanted to bury it, I could do that too and really nothing would be damaged or altered.

Sit down, fatty.

You're aware of how this subject is taught in schools, I assume.

I am, but it's normally never as crazy as the HD'ers claim.

In my experience it's basically doing a project, reading Night, and reading Maus. It's not really any better than any other particular topic the public school likes to focus on. Most people hardly know anything about it because the school covered it for 2-4 weeks, including WW2, and that's about it.

Being a fan of history, nobody knows shit from history about public school. I took my friends to go see "Dunkirk" and I had to give them a quick history lesson before the movie started, just so they got the idea of who was fighting, where, and why. All their knowledge of history basically comes from public school... so they didn't know shit. They guess WW2 started in 1937, and I was just glad they got around a good date.

Actually watching documentaries, listening to recordings, reviewing some court documents brought to Nuremburg, and JFC seeing Night And Fog, it's a whole different story.

I've pretty much settled on "it doesn't matter one way or the other".

Unfortunately, this genocide matters for 2 important reasons:

One: It is a fundamental aspect to National Socialism. The Holocaust had to occur because of National Socialism. If Germany had been Fascist instead of National Socialist, it wouldn't have happened. The war still would have been bloody, but the explicit extermination of the Jewish race was an imperative to National Socialism and Nazi argument of Judeo-Bolshevism, the Racial Theory of History, and Socialism as applied to race. That should concern the fuck out of you given how many Racial Socialists are appearing on the right and are making all the same claims.

Two: It's methodology was vastly different from most depopulation efforts. Genocide isn't even the typical method of depopulation, although war is. The National Socialists didn't let Jews out. They wanted to eradicate all of them to save Europe. Most of the time, conquering forces push people out before them. Even in Genocides, people flee. The National Socialists made sure they couldn't. This was a very deliberate effort of total extermination on a supra-national scale. The amount of Jews that the National Socialists had to kill was extreme. And they knew it. That's why they developed an infrastructure to do it. What HD'ers will run with sometimes is they will ask why the National Socialists didn't just shoot everyone. They were! But it wasn't fast enough, wasn't orderly enough, and used too much resources.

This why they had to use extermination camps. In economics it's called "Capital Investment". You make an investment in assets to make your production flow more efficient. Instead of having 10 people make widgets as fast as they can and producing 50 /hr. Make a widget machine that requires 5 people to operate and maintain, that makes 100 /hr. Without capital investment, maybe the best you can do is 100 people making 1000 widgits an hour. With capital investment in widget machines, you can hire might not hit that point of diminishing return until you get 200 people making 10,000 widgits an hour. That's the sinister part of this. These are factories of death. Murder is the commodity that the factory is producing. They made a capital investment in murder, and a logistical system to support it. They had an agenda to kill every single Jew in Europe without exception, and they were building a logistical system to do exactly that. It was the commodification of death that makes the Holocaust truly unique.

Personally, I blame the laws banning holocaust denial over there. Negative reinforcement is easy because it works poorly. Similarly, if we were encouraged to understand instead of simply memorize, I think most people wouldn't give it so much weight.

I don't think you're wrong. Censorship doesn't fix the problem. But there's also the fact that the National Socialists want to deny it because

• a) Stating that it is a moral imperative, as the National Socialists concluded, is really intolerable to all moral creatures

• b) It's a way of hoisting the Marxists and Communists on their own petard. They would like the systemic extermination of the Capitalist bourgeoisie. The National Socialists are asserting the Jews are the Capitalist bourgeoisie. It's a trap: if the National Socialists are Socialists, the Marxists have to admit they want a Holocaust of the rich... which happens to also include a lot of names that end in -stein. If the National Socialists are not Socialists, then they would never call for the extermination ... of bourgeoisie. To deny Socialism is to deny the Holocaust, to deny the Holocaust is to deny Socialism.

In the end, the National Socialists are straight up lying about the Holocaust which is something they think is a moral imperative, and their Useful Idiots are normally so ignorant of Holocaust in an even rudimentary way that there's rarely anything to talk about with them.