Since visiting Yad Veshem in 1999, Dachau in 2005, and Auschwitz in 2007, I've been puzzled how anyone could possibly deny the Holocaust happened. How does one simply deny the million pieces of documentation by multiple sources. The movies? The photos? The Nazi's own papers? The reports from the inmates, the liberators, the gaurds???
The Holocaust History Project explained the problem succinctly: "The denier gambit is a variant on the falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus (false in one thing, false in all things) formulation which claims that if any one fact about the Holocaust can be proven to be wrong, then all the reported facts are wrong and there was no Holocaust." The US Holocaust Memorial website also has some great links.
The deniers seem to fixate on one tiny, technical detail and use it as proof that the whole thing never happened. A denial website called the Institute for Historical Review (which purports to take an unbiased, historical look at the "facts") had a piece that said the figure of 6 million Jews killed was a gross exageration. It may have only been 4.6 million! As if that makes the difference between genocide and a couple of guys slipping on banana peels.
Another detail - there was a swimming pool at Auschwitz-Birkenau! So Auschwitz-Birkenau was really a luxury spa??? In reality, a couple of the long-term, non-Jewish, Polish prisoners put a board over the water tank in Birkenau and used it for swimming. These guys had kind of a wierd history. Birkenau was the work camp; Auschwitz the extermination camp. Some of the Polish political prisoners had been there for so long (since 1938, and before the purpose of the camp was changed into a Jewish extermination center) that they were put in charge of Jewish work gangs. They were called "kapos" and they were a sadistic bunch of bastards.
They also try to deny the Jews were systemically killed by claiming that most died of "natural causes" in the camps like disease and starvation, instead of in the gas chambers. Yet, how can anyone claim the conditions of the concentration camps were "natural." It's like saying that the Bataan Death March really wasn't an atrocity, because most of the American soldiers died of dehydration, exhaustion, disease and from "tripping" into bayonets and "falling" under trucks.
It's mind boggling the number of ways the Nazis came up with to torture, use, and murder all of these people. And even if deniers want to convince themselves that the Jews were never systematically killed, how can they also deny that the Nazis tried to wipe out the Poles, the Slavs, the Gypsys, the Soviets, the homosexuals, the handicapped, etc., etc.? Soviet prisoners of war were treated no better than dirt, and in violation of all the "rules of war" (not to mention the Geneva Convention), they were murdered as well.
I guess I can only finish this post by saying, we will remember. We will honor the dead and we will honor the survivors. Never again.
Memorial for the Jewish dead at Terezin - a "nicer" ghetto for Czech's Jews. Those who survived here at the beginning of the war were later sent to Auschwitz for "liquadation" toward the end of the war.
A memorial erected by the Soviets at Terezin for the countless number of Soviet POW's the Nazi's murdered here.
Auschwitz. It's scale is immense.
The "effecient" gas chambers and ovens at Auschwitz. The train tracks end here and after "selection," the too young, too old, too infirm were murdered. The Nazi's blew up the facilities before liberation to hide what they were doing.
Auschwitz is all conscreated ground because the soil is literally infused with bone dust and bone fragments of the victims. This memorial stands by the gas chambers.
Pawiak Prison in Warsaw. The Gestapo interrogated over 100,000 Poles here during the war, killing 37,000, and sending 60,000 to the concentration camps. All that's left is the foundation because more than 85% of Warsaw was leveled in the war - a large part of it after Nazi retaliation for the Warsaw uprising.
A monument to the 1944 Warsaw Uprising, which ultimately failed. This was after the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, where the remaining Jews in Warsaw were killed or sent to the camps. The Nazi's expelled the remaining civilian population and firebombed what remained of the city.
Before the war, there were almost 3.5 million Jews in Poland; after between 180,000 -240,000 were left. Over 3 million non-Jewish Poles died as well. How can one deny it?
