Talk:Holocaust denial

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Editorial notes
  • Documentary and physical evidence for gas chambers
  • Denier arguments concerning gas chambers - Prussian blue, ash disposal etc, and response
  • Deniers' disapproval of some survivor testimonies, and response
  • Deniers' illicit comparisons of Nazi Germany and Israel, and response Strom 02:41, 19 September 2009 (UTC)
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Blaming the Poles and Muslims[edit]

The article briefly mentions laws against blaming Poles for the Holocaust, but the topic of Polish complicity is controversial; blaming Poles isn't necessarily denialism.[1] (Just as some Jews, e.g. Hannah Arendt, have discussed Jewish complicity.[2])

What about claims that Muslims were the real instigators, not the Nazis/Germans. e.g.[3][4][5] (I'm sure I've seen claims that British or Americans suggested genocide to Hitler but can't find a reference - it maybe ties into the "Darwin made Hitler do it" creationist argument.)

Another controversial topic is that the German people had little or no knowledge of what was happening; this isn't necessarily denialism but can cross over into it. --Annanoon (talk) 11:07, 7 March 2019 (UTC)

it is denialism though isnt it. its not outright saying it didnt happen, or wasnt as bad as believed, its giving claims of complicity too much weight, as if hitler was some unknowing dupe led astray by those dastardly muslims. its either to negate the blame by nazis or to villify by association. whatever the motive, it ends with 'maybe the nazis werent that bad after all'. its utter shit. AMassiveGay (talk) 13:16, 7 March 2019 (UTC)
Feel free to add a section on this to the article. Bongolian (talk) 17:53, 7 March 2019 (UTC)

The Holocaust was a state secret in the Third Reich. The stage of mass killings did not happen inside Germany itself but instead in ghettos (starvation and disease), concentration camps (working people to exhaustion on starvation rations if not to outright execution as in gas chambers), and sites of mass shootings (typically in Ukraine and Belarus). People deputed to operate the telephone exchange or deliver written communications were told to not mention words such as Vernichtung (annihilation or extermination) or bureaucratic terms of the Holocaust. The Allies knew, but did not believe that relating the reality of the Holocaust would serve any purpose because such would not be believable. After all, the Germans thought themselves a civilized and enlightened people even if their leaders were barbaric in the extreme.

Bad things (from economic ruin to extermination) happened to Jews outside the view of civilians of Germany itself, let alone France, the Netherlands, Italy, Hungary, or Norway. Jews would be murdered out of sight and out of mind of most Germans. Jews obviously had no means of communicating their plight to people of conscience, and those had no idea of what a word like "resettlement in the East" really meant. It is safe to say that no Germans were taking pleasure trips to Poland or the occupied portions of the USSR.

Soldiers of the Wehrmacht often did know even if not complicit. If complicit? They knew.Pbrower2a (talk) 09:05, 24 January 2021 (UTC)—

use of terms[edit]

intro:

assertion that the Holocaust ..
never happened (denial),
or
happened vastly differently from the "official" story (revision)

Although that sounds how logical people might use the terms denial/revision, for critics of those who question the narrative, it isn't actually how they are used.

"vastly" for example, is not a requirement. Even slightly disagreeing with something will get some criticized as a "revisionist". For example, if instead of 6,000,000 Jews, someone says only 5,999,999 Jews died, they would be condemned as a "revisionist" even though this is not a VAST difference. A term like that also allows too much interpretation. If you proposed 5,999,000 for example, would a difference of 1000 be fast? What about 10,000 or 100,000 or 1,000,000 ? There is no established amount of what "vast" means.

For that reason, I am removing that adjective, it's worthless.

Secondly, "revisionists" tend to just get called "deniers" because even if the revision keeps the number high it's still "Denying". Ty (talk) 20:12, 18 June 2019 (UTC)

Labels[edit]

The attempted distinction in labels between "truther", "denier", and "revisionist" is bizarre. They are all deniers, just of different sorts or degrees. The use of the term "revisionist" is especially insidious because this can also be used for mainstream, non-denialist historians' work (whether Holocaust related or not) that legitimately challenges previously-existing works, often using new evidence. The term one is looking for in place of "revisionist" would be "negationist", though this is itself just a synonym for historical denialism. I suppose another possible term for these "revisionists" (i.e. "soft deniers") would be Holocaust distortionists. Chillpilled (talk) 09:59, 26 November 2023 (UTC)

I've changed the way things are labeled myself, now, without too radically restructuring the article. One thing I should note is that the "blaming the victim" category given in the lead section is actually itself a form of "Holocaust distortionism". However, I guess distinguishing it as its own sort is not really doing harm. Chillpilled (talk) 10:59, 26 November 2023 (UTC)

The Straight Dope - Denying?[edit]

I took a quick look at the Straight Dope article linked at the bottom as a Holocaust-denying source. The article seems to affirm that the Holocaust happened and that denier arguments don't hold up, so I'm confused about why it's considered a Holocaust-denying source. Was this a mistake? Or perhaps done by a troll? Or maybe there's some full context that I'm missing. — Unsigned, by: 198.71.96.139 / talk / contribs

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Thank you for pointing that out. I will change that label right now. --Goatspeed. See what I'm up toCircularREmail2.gifasoningSteal my ideas 21:54, 3 December 2023 (UTC)

Malmedy massacre trial cock and balls torture[edit]

In which it's said that a guy claimed 137 Nazi defendants had their balls crushed before trial. The guy who supposedly said it (Edward L. Van Roden) denies under oath ever saying it. A little extra, unnecessary background commentary: there seem to have been a couple of key players in producing this one, the National Council for the Prevention of War and The ProgressiveWikipedia (a magazine). The former seems to have been some kind of anti-war, isolationist group so I can assume they were against the United States entering World War II, a cause which tended to attract different sorts of fellows depending on the year but always including Nazi sympathizers (at the Molotov-Ribbentrop period it would have included many communists but this was after the war, so I would think not by then). The Progressive was also against the war until Pearl Harbor.

Bonus: Joseph McCarthy gets his information about supposed torture (including more cock and ball torture...) at the trial from Rudolf Aschenauer. I see it variously claimed Aschenauer was either a "communist agent" or a neo-Nazi (I'm inclined to believe the latter), either way he gave false information.

Regards the Dachau concentration camp guards apparently but seems there has been some meaning extrapolated towards the validity of the Nuremberg trials. Chillpilled (talk) 21:24, 19 March 2024 (UTC)