This essay/post is the result of the disturbing trend within some sectors of society to deny, diminish or otherwise undermine the historicity of the Holocaust. Besides the obvious groups like Neo-Nazis, anti-Semites and elements of the Muslim/Christian fundamentalist communities, there is perhaps one group in the 21st Century more responsible for perpetuating the myth that the Holocaust never happened or is vastly exaggerated: conspiracy theorists.
I know this first hand as I am in many ways what can be termed a conspiracy theorist in my work as an author and independent researcher. However, I try to mainly focus on what I call “underground knowledge” – mostly factual things that have been overlooked or underreported in our mainstream media. As WikiLeaks’ founder Julian Assange succinctly put it: “There are conspiracies everywhere. There are also crazed conspiracy theories. It’s important not to confuse these two.” In other words, I write about ideas supported by strong evidence substantiated in court cases, declassified government files and the like rather than pure speculation. Important issues, such as high finance crimes which decimate communities worldwide and media manipulation which can lead to unnecessary wars, that I believe are crucial for people to know about. Often these subjects are conspiracy fact or conspiracy reality rather than theories.
Sometimes as an author and social activist in this field, I get approached by a certain type of casual reader or amateur investigator who form a dangerous element within the conspiracy field: those who simply regurgitate ideas they read about online and attempt to debate historically-proven events like the Holocaust as if they are up for debate at all. And of course the internet is the perfect technology for bigots and haters to capture young and impressionable or otherwise naïve minds. Lately, I have been getting almost weekly emails from people who question whether the Holocaust occurred as per the history books – some of these people even include other authors. Plus, as I have written extensively about the Holocaust and its dark legacy, I also get hate mail quite often from anti-Semites.
Note that I have put my name in the title of this post not for egotistical reasons but because I, as a non-Jew, am standing up with all my being to say one thing: The Holocaust happened EXACTLY as per the history books. Period. Fact. No debate about it whatsoever.
Wikipedia’s definition of this historical event summarizes what mainstream historians universally agree upon:
“The Holocaust, also known as the Shoah, was a genocide in which Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Germany and its collaborators killed about six million Jews. Period: January 30, 1933 – May 8, 1945.”
I believe the Holocaust is an extremely important historical event humanity must learn from if our civilization is to eventually survive let alone achieve world peace one day. In my opinion, all truthseekers should study how on Earth this event was allowed to occur (and “allowed” is the correct term as such genocides are never just perpetrators and victims but rather perpetrators, victims AND bystanders…).
Those who challenge the vast and indisputable historicity of the Holocaust like to state they fall into two distinct camps: Holocaust Deniers (those who say the entire crime of the Nazis never occurred and is just a result of post-war propaganda) and the more common Holocaust Revisionists (those who try to downgrade the death figures from 6 million Jews to only about 50,000 or 500,000 max). But note that the latter group like to also imply that of the tens or hundreds of thousands of Jews they claim to have (only) died, few if any of these “casualties of war” were the result of gas chambers. So essentially revisionists are still denying the Holocaust as there’s really very little difference between saying 95% of the Holocaust never happened as saying 100% of it never happened.
So for the rest of this post I will only use the term Holocaust Deniers as I feel the term Holocaust Revisionists gives them far too much respect and makes them sound intellectual or even academic.
I have studied all sides of this so-called debate, read Holocaust survivors’ books and watched documentary footage of the actual Holocaust, listened to recordings of Hitler’s speeches and infamous Holocaust deniers like David Irving, studied WW2 history etc, etc.
And I can assure you of one thing: Holocaust Deniers always have anti-Semitism somewhere inside them. ALWAYS.
Deniers will pretend they are impartial and say they have simply discovered anomalies in historical records that they wish to report, but deep down there will definitely be a hatred of Jews (even if only a subconscious or unconscious hatred). Sometimes the anti-Semitism is very clear (e.g. David Irving, who after years of claiming he was an unbiased historian with no racial hatred whatsoever, has since made disparaging remarks against Jews and various other non-White races – see his interview with Australian journalist John Safran as one example of Irving’s vile racism https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0rBCst4hph0 ). Other times it’s more like a subtle form of brainwashing that is either conspiracy based (e.g. wrongly assuming the banking elite are all Jewish or believing in the age-old myth that the Jews control the entire world) or else religious-based where certain fundamentalists (primarily in extremist forms of Christianity or Islam) believe the Jews are an inferior race or practice an inferior religion.
I’ve also met a lot of Holocaust survivors and seen the numbered tattoos on their arms that were branded on them by the Nazis. I have listened to the personal eyewitness accounts of these survivors and about what occurred inside the concentration camps and the various atrocities Europe-wide during WW2.
So allow me to list a few of the common myths Holocaust Deniers perpetuate:
MYTH #1: “You could not kill 6,000,000 people in those facilities in Auschwitz and the other death camps! The 6 million figure would be almost impossible to achieve, it would had to have been a hell of a meatgrinder and a superhuman work to kill such an enormous amount of people.”
Firstly, 11 million people were killed in the Holocaust, six million of which were Jews, but not all were killed in the death camps (Approximately 3 million Jews are estimated to have died within the concentration camps and not all from being gassed either, many also died from being overworked, malnourished, diseased or experimented on).
Besides the concentration camps, there were Nazi death squads and Eastern European Nazi associates operating with machine guns all over Europe who rounded up and massacred Jews en masse in towns and cities (about 1.5 million are estimated to have been shot in what historians refer to as open-air killings in cities and towns all over Europe). Just research the amount of open-air shootings in Lithuania and Poland alone to see what I mean. Virtually all of which are highly documented.
Beyond Nazi and Nazi associated death squads who machine gunned large groups of Jews all over Europe outside of the concentration camps, the 6 million figure also includes about 500,000 Jews who were starved to death in ghettos in Germany and Poland during AND before the war (refer to the aforementioned definition of the Holocaust being from 1933 until 1945, meaning the death toll began 7 years before the World War began because for European Jews the war started long before Germany began its assault on the rest of the world).
Besides Jews, the other victims in the Holocaust were the Nazis other “inferior races” or “ïnferior groups” including Roma Gypsies, Poles, Homosexuals, Freemasons, Jehova’s Witnesses, Slovenes and disabled people – and these resulted in millions of additional deaths that form the 11 million people in total. It’s also very interesting, if you stop to think about it, that nobody ever seems to spend much time denying the fact that all the millions of non-Jewish who were killed in the Holocaust…It’s only the death of that many Jews that creates controversy…Why??? The answer is very simple: They are Jewish. That’s it – it really is that simple. Had this happened to any other group of people, there would be few if any complaints whatsoever and everyone would accept the facts. Anti-Semitism is one of the most aggressive forces on the planet and always has been going right back to Biblical times…
The Nazis themselves were also meticulous record keepers and kept extensive documentation on deportations and deaths of Jews. Human rights groups have recovered much of the Nazi documentation relating to the Holocaust and have so far found the IDs for over three million Jewish Holocaust victims and additional documentation relating to the other five million non-Jews who died. This is all easily sourced in the public domain for anyone to find.
Make no mistake about it, most of the Jews living in Europe at that time were killed. About 75% of all European Jews died in fact.
There simply is zero debate on this issue and it is completely historically verified.
And the good news is you can easily prove all this to yourself (and to others) by checking out this frightening statistic:
The global Jewish population in 1939 was 15 million.
Today the global population is just under 13 million!
You can see it on the graph at the bottom of this Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_diaspora
So that’s undeniable proof of the Holocaust right there in black and white.
Because the populations of ALL other ethnic groups increase over time.
They never decrease unless there’s a major famine or massive war (or an ethnic cleansing!).
So this statistic alone should be enough to silence all those who still deny many millions died in WW2. Because if any other ethnic group had a global population of 15 million in 1939 they would ordinarily be about 25-30 million in this era. So how come the Jewish population shrunk so drastically? The answer again is very simple and can be summed up in two words: The Holocaust.
MYTH #2: “The reason the real story about the Holocaust cannot ever be proven is because it is taboo. If you publicly want to discuss the numbers, depending on what country you are, you may be arrested. Why? If this is so well documented then why not just prove it to the people to shut up the deniers. Why forbid them to show their version of facts?”
It’s not a taboo to investigate the Holocaust at all. You can study it until your heart is content. If you go to Europe right now and study historical records of the Holocaust and inspect the IDs the Nazis kept as documentation of Jewish deaths you could literally spend the rest of your life studying these details and nobody anywhere will stop you – in fact you will be greatly encouraged to do so. However, your confusion of the legality issue merely lies in the fact that in certain countries in Europe like German, Austria, Poland and a few others it is illegal to promote any ideology that says the Holocuast did not happen as per the history books. It is literally written into those countries law books and is in recognition of the fact that it is the worst crime in living memory and also that there is still a tremendous amount of anti-Semites and Neo Nazis in Europe today and these countries are worried history could repeat itself. But this is in no way related to your (incorrect) assumption that this means a cover-up of the real history of the Holocaust is occurring. The proof of the Holocaust numbers is there for all to see in plain sight. Like I said, if you arrive in Europe now and say to any official in any European nation “Hi, my name is XXXXX and I would like to study the Holocuast indepth and inspect the records of those who died and all the evidence of the Holocaust,” they will welcome you with open arms.
However, if some Holocaust denying, anti-Semitic, Nazi sympathizing, Hitler apologist arrives in say Germany or Austria to give a speech about why the Holocaust is greatly exaggerated or says he wants to hold a public debate about whether this historical event actually occurred, he will either be turned away at the airport or imprisoned.
Now, that’s all fair enough in my books and is not unusual. For example, if I was an author and speaker who has repeatedly said African-Americans were never slaves in America’s history and millions did not die in the slave trade and it’s all simply propaganda, do you think US authorities would let me into the country? And would I as a foreigner be allowed to stay in the country and give such hate-filled speeches about black descendants and US citizens? No.
MYTH #3: “We now know media and governments lie and that all wars are made by propaganda. They lied a lot about Hitler, even silly things (he was a sexual pervert, he had only one testicle, he had flatulence etc). If they lied or exaggerated about such things, how can we be assured the rest of the things they told us about World War Two are absolutely true?”
Wars always have vast amounts of propaganda on all sides and certain things said about Hitler are not remotely related to how many Jews died in the Holocaust. That’s like saying just because there were racist cartoons about the Japanese in WW2 that compared the Japanese to animals and even accused them of bestiality, proves they didn’t kill millions throughout the Pacific.
MYTH #4: “Three million deceased Jews in concentration camps is still a huge number. If you consider that the relentless killing didn’t start until some time into World War II, it would need an extraordinary effort for a single country which was already struggling on a two-front war. And the camps did not have the necessary infrastructure to kill and remove the bodies of millions of people. Germany did not have the logistics to pull off such a crime.”
The Nazi regime’s orchestration concerning the concentration camps was incredibly efficient (and again, all fully documented mostly by the Nazis themselves). There were 8 main camps. The highest death toll of Jewish prisoners/victims was Auschwitz at 1 million. Others had about 300,000-500,000 deaths in each. Each camp definitely had the necessary infrastructure to easily and systematically create such a death toll over the entire war. The camps were all built with railway tracks right outside the gates and German (non-Jewish) witnesses report multiple trains per day would leave and depart at each camp (sometimes even hourly trains). These trains were either constantly delivering new victims/prisoners or else bringing in supplies. And this amount of large trains continued from near the start of the war until the very end.
Now you say “it would need an extraordinary effort for a single country which was already struggling on a two-front war” which reveals another common misunderstanding. Germany should not be viewed as just a country at this point. Nazi Germany cannot be compared to modern day Germany or any other single country for that matter, because the fact is Germany had become the Third Reich by that stage. Now just think about what the Third Reich was: one of the most powerful empires in history. It had looted the riches of half of Europe (after having invaded or over-run powerhouse nations like France, Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Greece, Poland etc), it was secretly receiving enormous funds from the Vatican Bank (yes, the Catholics were aware of Hitler’s intent toward the Jews) and also some Swiss banks were supporting the Third Reich too. Plus, the Nazis had fascist allies like Mussolini’s Italy and even Japan from afar.
So a far better or more appropriate question to ask yourself is: “Could a regime that controls almost all of Europe’s resources and wealth kill a few million defenseless Jews who nobody cared about or would defend?” The obvious answer, if you stop to think about it, is: “Yes! Relatively effortlessly!”
Even during the extremely small-scale Balkan/Bosnian wars in the 1990s in Yugoslavia there were mass graves found of ethnic killings in the tens of thousands and I think well over 100,000 were killed in those (comparatively) tiny wars in which most of it was similarly about ethnic cleansings.
MYTH #5: “Most of the Jews died in the camps due to bad working conditions, famine and diseases, which doesn’t make the picture more pretty than if they were just gassed, but it does undermine the supposed history of the Holocaust.”
Um, no, it does not undermine the history of the Holocaust at all. The gassings were simply one part of the deaths in the camps (again, that’s another very common misunderstanding to think the 3 million who died within the camps were ALL the result of gassings). Remember, the concentration camps were not only designed to exterminate Jews. They were also the hub of the Third Reich in many ways as the Jews were a cheap or free labor force performing many duties day and night including manufacturing and all sorts of work duties that helped the regime. Nazi scientists were also conducting wide-scale medical experimentation on hundreds of thousands of Jews (horrific experiments which killed most experimentees). Starting to get the picture of how so many could have died within these camps?
Now when it comes to records of gas chambers themselves, all mainstream historians agree they are 100% verified and that a large percentage of those who died in the camps died from the result of either carbon monoxide or Zyklon B gasses. This is a good starting place for the historical facts surrounding the gas chambers: https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Holocaust/gascamp.html
Besides the assessment of historians, there have also been numerous independent scientific reports published on the gas chambers over the years, including the following examples:
Jean-Claude Pressac (1944 – 2003) – a French pharmacist who was formerly a Holocaust denier, undertook a forensic examination of the Auschwitz gas chambers in 1979. The result? He was shocked by the overwhelming evidence. In 1989 he published a book that confirmed the established view that the gas chambers were functional, killing between 631,000 and 711,000 prisoners (at Auschwitz alone).
Deborah E. Lipstadt‘s book Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory won the UK libel case ‘Irving v Penguin Books and Lipstadt’. The case contained forensic examination for use of gas chambers.
One of the common claims of Holocaust Deniers involves the reconstructed gas chambers built by the Polish government after WW2 at Auschwitz as a memorial to the victims. The Nazis destroyed the original gas chambers where mass murders were committed, and the simulated gas chambers at Auschwitz have never had Zyklon-B deployed in them. Deniers frequently exploit such confusion. At Majdanek, which the Nazis did not successfully destroy, evidence of the use of Zyklon-B appears in the bluing of the concrete. Hydrogen cyanide reacts with iron compounds to form the pigment Prussian blue.
MYTH #6: “You cannot deny that Jews have a huge influence in the banking/financial world and in the media, can you?”
No I wouldn’t deny Jews have a big influence in the banking/financial world and media. But I’ll go much further than that. They have made an enormous mark in virtually every field known to man: from mathematics to publishing to science to medicine to economics to human rights campaigning to engineering. When you consider there are less than 13 million Jews worldwide (about half of the population of Mexico City) they are an incredible people and it’s not just in this era they are world leaders – they always have been (and all that despite never having a country of their own until the mid-20th Century and being up against a mountain of anti-Semitism in every other country they have resided in). They have always been a people throughout history who have largely sculpted the world we live in. It’s also hard to see how women’s rights or the legal equality of races or child welfare or animal rights or environmental protection would have occurred when they did without the Jews (research history and you’ll see they were even at the forefront of these movements). Even many or most of the Nobel Prize winners have been Jewish. And all this success or achievement or service to humanity or whatever you want to call it is partly responsible for the hatred and anti-Semitism as people cannot believe that any one small minority can achieve so much in virtually every field without they being corrupt or scoundrels. I mean can you imagine if say half the world’s most successful people on earth came from some little known state in Brazil? That would be the equivalent. And after a while, the rest of the world would get jealous and say things like “those people from Mato Grosso do Sul are liars and cheats and are secretly controlling the world”…So besides the religious thing where anti-Semitic viewpoints thrive within fundamentalist, Far Right or extremist versions of Christianity and Islam, the success of these brilliant and community-orientated people is one of the biggest reasons the Jews have historically been hated and also partly why the Nazis wanted them gone.
Now the whole banking field is another area I have studied a lot and actually co-written a book on. And yes there are many leading Jews in this field but like I point out there are leading Jews in almost every field, so what. The Rothschilds are just one of dozens of banking clans some are Jewish but many are not Jewish. The Rothschilds are people I don’t like, but the way they are held up to represent Jews in general is a joke. There are good and bad people in all races. The fact that there are many Jews in the banking sector is being used by Neo Nazis and anti-Semites in general to try to sway the uneducated to believe the Jews are the problem instead of banking assholes in general.
MYTH #7: “I am pretty sure Hitler had racist ideas and saw Jewry were his main enemy. However, his main objective was NOT to wipe out the Jews from the face of the Earth. If they had departed from Germany it would have been reasonable for him.”
If you read Mein Kampf and listen to Hitler’s speeches, getting rid of the Jews was a huge part of his agenda. Nazi Germany’s desire for “racial purity” was very real and the concepts of the Final Solution are well documented. But did Hitler also have world domination and other wider goals not related to the Jews? Yes definitely, but that doesn’t change the fact that his expressed desire to get rid of these people and expel them not only from Germany but from the ever-expanding Third Reich is all on-the-record and official. No getting around that, buddy.
MYTH #8: “I have seen various figures about the numbers of Jews who died in Europe. It’s hard to know which statistic to believe! There is almost no unbiased data about this subject!”
The death tolls are estimates and cannot ever be 100% precise. Just like nobody can estimate how many exactly died in the Vietnam War (some say 3M Vietnamese and 58,000 Americans, others say 3.2M Vietnamese and 60,000 Americans). There will always be slight variances in death tolls of wars spanning entire continents, especially if you go as far back as WW2. But these slight variances are not remotely related to Holocaust Deniers who are trying to revise things (to support their hate-filled agendas) by claiming 90-100% of the Holocaust deaths (e.g. 5-6 million Jews) are some fairytale concocted years after the war. Rest assured the only books anywhere that talk about the tiny death toll numbers Holocaust Deniers believe in (i.e. thousands or hundreds of thousands instead of millions) are either Holocaust denying books written by the likes of David Irving and other anti-Semitic “historians” or Neo Nazi groups. There are no mainstream history books ever published now or anytime since 1945 that ever mention a death toll that isn’t in the millions for the Holocaust. Period.
If you go beyond the death tolls from the concentration camps, and study the open-air massacres in places like Lithuana and Poland (which tens or even hundreds of non-Jews have verified as being witnesses of) you will see millions were killed in these events alone. So to believe in Holocaust denialism you have to ignore perhaps 1 million different witnesses and survivors (from Jews to Gypsies to Germans to Poles to children etc, etc) who all verify the Holocaust. These independent testimonies, as well as the Nazi’s documentation of concentration camp detainees who died, all add up to the confirmed estimates of the Holocaust death toll (universally agreed upon by ALL mainstream historians as being 6 million Jews give or take a few hundred thousand either way, could be slightly more could be slightly less).
It is potentially the most well-documented crime of the 20th Century but remember to religious extremists, Nazi apologists or other anti-Semites it would never matter how much evidence you put in front of them they would always deny the Holocaust as to admit the event occurred is to stop believing the Jews are inferior to them.
For further proof, this site uses abundant evidence to successfully debunk all other arguments Holocaust Deniers raise: http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Holocaust_denial
Lastly, I’d like to add the motto of Holocaust Survivors: NEVER FORGET.
Peace,
James Morcan
P.S. For anyone else who stands against Holocaust denialism, feel free to add your voice by posting in the comments section below, or else spreading the word by sharing this blog post. Thanks.
