Survivor guilt
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The official figures are as easy to dispute as pointing out that there's no way to burn that many bodies that fast.
What likely happened is they simply took large numbers of Jews as political prisoners and as the war effort soured their ability to sustain the camps diminished, which resulted in the most prisoner deaths (which probably only broke into the hundreds of thousands, if that). They weren't actually coming up with Rube Goldberg contraptions to execute Jews with, much less burning millions of corpses.
They were taking political prisoners, however. That much is undeniable. It was an authoritarian regime but so much about it has been completely blown out of proportion.
If you don't know what the Holocaust is, sure.
I can't believe I have to do this again, but if you're saying "6 million Jews 7 furnaces", then you literally have no idea what the Holocaust is or how it happened.
You must have a basic, elementary, level grasp on the topic in order to dispute it.
If you're saying Nazis injected hydrogen cyanide from the ceiling to mass kill people, I got some questions. Not even disputing the numbers. The idea is just so asinine on its face.
What are you going to argue, hydrogen cyanide doesn't lead to cyanide poisoning?
Mostly just take issue with introducing a lighter than air poison from the ceiling. If you're building a purpose built controlled environment, introduce it from the floor. Hell, use actual showers to activate Zyklon B through floor grates.
It's just so fucking stupid how it's proposed to have happened. Absolutely degenerate inefficiency.
They claim that 1.1 million people were killed in gas chambers by using a pellet based insecticide. Where are the piles of bodies, the ashes? And no, using Soviet accounts is not reliable.
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/).
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'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.
I guess they need to set the story straight on wikipedia then.
No no no no, not six million Jews and seven furnaces?
I'm saying six million pizzas and only four ovens.
Sit down, fatty.
An awkward topic. You're aware of how this subject is taught in schools, I assume. The well has been not only poisoned but turned into a toxic dump. I have questions about both sides of the coin, but I'm too tired of the subject to ask.
I've pretty much settled on "it doesn't matter one way or the other". It's taught for political purposes rather than historical understanding, and I don't think propaganda deserves serious consideration (though it can help people understand how much of a farce school is).
Even if it didn't happen, it doesn't change the context of the war. It doesn't even change the aftermath. Things were fucked, for sure, and I mostly find myself annoyed by this distraction that impedes my understanding of the relevant events.
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 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.
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.
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.
I was really surprised with the subtlety of this movie. Made it seem more realistic to not have every character saying "nazi". I don't think they even specified nationalities? It seemed like a movie made for adults, which I respected. I barely recall anything about the history, though, even being similarly told about it beforehand.
Perhaps I should have asked you to define The Holocaust, as most of my points are going to revolve around it being the "disputed" eradication of millions of jews. If you pull it back to include the, erm, civilian antics, then I wouldn't have much to say.
The meat of the issue, to me, comes before they were being rounded up in camps. There was some clear hostility. It was being encouraged among the citizens and backed by the state to various degrees. I do agree about this being desirable for the political philosophy at play - I just don't want to feel trapped by a real death toll to justify claiming that it was a bad idea.
Like..one of the arguments I liked from HD (holocaust deniers) was that the camps were intended as transitional spaces for the jews. This is the idea that they didn't need to die, they just needed to get out. Obviously there are some flaws in this, but I'm not trying to argue that it's true. My point is that it led me to the thought experiment of assuming it was true, and that even if zero jews had died, it doesn't make everything happy and fun. Bad things were done. I think the death part really undermines the tragedy at play, in fact.
I don't know much about this part, I never really saw it mentioned before. But I'll accept it here. Even in a savior theory where the state offers their protection to jews because those crazy citizens are out of hand, so come to our safe camp until things settle down (made up the most generous theory I could) - the ideologies at play are wholly responsible for things getting that bad in the first place and it turns into one of those disgusting displays where the plague-bearer is selling cures.
I do wonder how much of this is that classic german efficiency versus how much was politically inevitable for a modern sort of society.
I'll agree here. I can't quite describe why, but something about the argument troubles me. Something about totalitarianism. Do whatever you want on your own land, but don't demand your neighbors do the same. Modern problem being that small scale societies may not exist anymore, as if totalitarianism is an evolutionary certainty.
The way you describe it in this section, makes it sound like the ideology was refined for the purpose of dominating socialism-adjacent philosophies. Do you think that's true?
Admittedly I share sympathies with it there. I think it's hard not to with how skewed society is right now. Living paycheck to paycheck really sucks and no amount of effort can dig you out of that hole if that effort isn't directed just right. Impossible to lift your head and look around when you're exhausted and demoralized. And we don't all have family or friends to count on for sound advice.
If they all didn't make such terrible arguments/suggestions, maybe I'd be caught up in "anti-capitalism" as well. I'm dreading the time when I have to talk one of my dumb relatives down, they're heading that way.
Sort of an aside here, but how do you even classify "the right"? It's no fun to look up definitions for these things. I tried to make a definition based off the thing you say about leftism being a philosophy of war. Since leftism is about power, that'd make 'rightism' about principle, wouldn't it? I don't see this asked often enough online, considering the frequency of "right-wing" being passed out as a label.
What I'm most concerned about is the civil unrest and authoritative racialism and how they're being interwoven. Seems too much like that Weimar period to me. Even if I don't think we're gonna have any death camps here, I can't shake this fear. There's much worse things than death anyway.
Edit:
Kinda jealous here. My most memorable experience for holocaust learning was a highschool german class where my bleeding heart teacher had us watch Schindler's List and got really upset when I laughed at something in the movie (some directorially hamfisted moment; I wasn't openly edgy). Ironically way more involved and manipulative than anything I ever got from history class.