Holocaust denial

I have been reading a lot of stuff recently, some of which has disturbed me.  There are a lot of people out there who say the Holocaust, that horrible time in history they taught us about in school never really happened the way they say it did. 

They cite how there's no way camps like auschewits(sp?) had the capacity to eliminate as many people as they said were held there.  They talk about how zyklon-b wasn't really powerful enough to kill anyone, and those showers apparently outfitted with this chemical were actually used for a delousing procedure.  They talk about how it doesn't make any sense to trick people into going to their death when you've already got them in your custody.

I don't know man; holocaust deniers seem to have information to back them up, all kinds of evidence, to which the holocaust sympathizers only have name calling and questioning the motives of those who deny it.  I am someone who really would like to believe that the holocaust happened, if only so that I can believe there isn't a vast conspiracy behind it.  So, any holocaust sympathizers with a good rebuttal to what they're saying?

# "No human soap"? This is true, but misleading. Though there is some evidence that soap was made from corpses on a very limited experimental scale, the rumored "mass production" was never done, and no soap made from human corpses is known to exist. However, there is sworn testimony, never refuted, from British POWs and a German army official, stating that soap experiments were performed, and the recipe for the soap was captured by the Allies. To state flatly that the Nazis did not make soap from human beings is incorrect.

# "No lamp shades made of human skin?" False -- lampshades and other human-skin "ornaments" were introduced as evidence in both trials of Ilse Koch, and were shown to a U.S. Senate investigation committee in the late 40s. We know they were made of human skin because they bore tattoos, and because a microscopic forensic analysis of the items was performed. (A detailed page on this is being prepared.)

# "No records"? This is nonsense (which may explain why this claim was removed from the "revised" versions of the 66 Q&A). True, extermination by gassing was always referred to with code-words, and those victims who arrived at death camps only to be immediately gassed were not recorded in any books. But there are slip-ups in the code-word usage that reveal the true meanings, as already described. There are inventories and requisitions for the Krema which reveal items anomalous with ordinary use but perfect for mass homicidal gassing. There are deportation train records which, pieced together, speak clearly. And so on. Several examples have been given above.

# "No credible demographic statistics"? This is the second internal contradiction -- see question 2 and question 15. The Anglo-American committee who studied the issue estimated the number of Jewish victims at 5.7 million. This was based on population statistics. Here is the exact breakdown, country by country:

Germany 195,000
Austria 53,000
Czechoslovakia 255,000
Denmark 1,500
France 140,000
Belgium 57,000
Luxemburg 3,000
Norway 1,000
Holland 120,000
Italy 20,000
Yugoslavia 64,000
Greece 64,000
Bulgaria 5,000
Rumania 530,000
Hungary 200,000
Poland 3,271,000
USSR 1,050,000
Less dispersed refugees (308,000)
Total number of Jews killed 5,721,500

(This estimate was arrived at using population statistics, and not by adding the number of casualties at each camp. These are also available -- for instance, a separate file with the ruling of a German court regarding the number of victims in Treblinka is available. The SS kept rather accurate records, and many of the documents survived, reinforced by eyewitness accounts).

Some estimates are lower, some are higher, but this is the magnitude in question. In an article in CMU's student newspaper, the head of CMU's History Department, Peter Stearns, is quoted as saying that newly discovered documents -- especially in the former USSR -- indicate that the number of victims is higher than six million. Other historians claim not much over five million. The Encyclopedia of the Holocaust uses 5,596,000 as a minimum and 5,860,000 as a maximum (Gutman, 1990, p. 1799).

# In summary:

"Revisionists" often claim, correctly, that the burden of proof is on historians. The proof, of course, has been a matter of public record since late 1945, and is available in libraries around the world. The burden has been met, many, many times over. You've just seen a brief presentation of some of the highlights of that immense body of proof; much more is readily available.

To even argue that the Holocaust never happened is ludicrous. To claim straight-faced that none of this proof even exists is beyond ludicrous, and it is a clear example of "revisionist" dishonesty.

http://www.nizkor.org/qar-complete.cgi