Iran plans "scientific" conference to deny Holocaust
Krematorium II functioned as a homicidal gas chamber and incineration installation from 15th March 1943, before its officially coming into service on 31st March, to 27th November, 1944, annihilating a total of approximately 400,000 people, most of them Jewish women, children and old men.
Krematorium III was used in similar fashion from 25th June 1943 to 27th November 1944, killing about 350,000 victims. Thus approximately three-quarters of the Jewish victims of KL Auschwitz-Birkenau were gassed and reduced to ashes in these two buildings.
--Pressac, Jean Claude. Auschwitz: Technique and Operation of the Gas Chambers. The Beate Klarsfeld Foundation, NY: 1989. Pg. 183)
Though it grieves me to report this, two confessional Lutheran friends of mine- a pair of brothers- have bought into the crackpot theories of Holocaust denial. That their position is neither historically viable nor intellectually defensible doesn't seem to bother them much. Not even grim, categorical evidence like photograph above of what Allied soldiers found at the Maidanek camp seems to phase them. Perhaps they think it was done with Photoshop?
They say that there is no evidence that six million Jews were murdered by the Nazis. Oh, sure, they admit- some were killed. But nowhere near six million. And it surely wasn't a function of state policy!
Except that there were, and it was- and the evidence, like the photographs in this entry and the testimony not only of the survivors but even some of those responsible- Adolph Eichmann comes to mind- leaves absolutely no room for doubt.
Above is a picture of Polish citizens examining the ovens in which there is supposedly no evidence that the bodies of Jewish prisoners murdered at Maidanek were burned. Many of the ovens at the extermination camps still contained doubtless wholly imaginary human remains.
Oscar Schindler's famous list, below, is a figment of your imagination. There was no necessity for him to manufacture supposedly vital war industry functions for the innocent men, women and children on the list in order to save them from extermination camps which didn't exist. Uh-huh.
My friends would like to assure you that what you see below may appear to be evidence of the Holocaust, but it's really not. Perhaps the dead bodies stacked up like cordwood posed that way, in order to confuse us. Or maybe gremlins dug them up from cemetaries. Or maybe they were in the habit of taking group naps in layers.
I think you get the point by now- and probably have some idea of how long I could go on like this. I really don't think my friends are anti-Semites, by the way- unlike most who adopt their silly- no, obscenely dishonest, as well as silly- position. I actually think that in their specific case, what's going on is a consuming desire that our common German heritage was not stained by one of the greatest crimes of modern history. I think they're motivated by a deep desire not to believe that Germans could have done such a thing.
I, too, wish that the Holocaust were a myth- that it didn't really happen. But there are still a great many people alive who wish it far more than I do- because if that were the case, their loved ones would have grown old with them instead of dying in those gas chambers.
In any case, I'm not willing to sacrifice either my intellect or my integrity in order to pursue transparently bogus, crackpot theories, no matter how I wish that the Holocaust had never happened, especially at the hands of a people whose blood runs in my own veins- and that's the difference between those two friends of mine and me.
As I say, these are good- though absurdly and obscenely misguided- people. Perhaps they'll wake up to the silliness of their position when they read that their fellow Holocaust denier, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is apparently planning a "scientific conference" to "examine" the Holocaust in order to further his own crackpot agenda.
I hope so. I like these guys, and I'm grieved by their adherence to an intellectually dishonest agenda which diminishes my respect for them.
People interested in the truth about holocaust denial and other such lunacy can find a wealth of information- all they really need, actually- here. It's an eye-opener especially about the people behind this ugly and dishonest movement.
Besides the President of Iran, that is.
Comments
I certainly agree with you that anti-Semitism is essentially what drives holocaust revisionism. I'd prefer not to think that my friends are anti-semites... but like you, I have such a hard time trying to understand how any rational person could deny the Holocaust that I have trouble totally convincing myself of that even with them.
I hope, in their cases, that we're both wrong. I'd prefer to think so. But as you say, it's just not a conclusion one can reach in good faith- and the influence of the kind of ignorance promoted by the newspaper to which you refer cannot be discounted.
For my part, I believe that as huge a crime as the Holocaust was, those of German blood need to be in denial about it no more than Americans should be about the genocide of the Indians, the British the crimes of their colonial career, the Russians the crimes of Stalin, the Chinese those of Mao... well, you get the point. It's with honesty even about crimes for which one is not personally responsible that healing comes. Denial never saved anybody's honor.
i read & found that it is actually jewish refugees, mainly from Eastern Europe, who had immigrated to Palestine on a large-scale basis (1922-1947). because of the Nazi persecution, the arabic palestine received an influx of jewish migrants -- which then ironically creates a jewish-arab demographic issue.
isn't it true that palestine has given refuge to jews during the Holocaust? if you deny this, then you deny the Holocaust.
you should get the point. if not, maybe it's you in denial.
Palestine was a British protectorate- and beyond the very early days, the British did everything within their power to keep those refugees out. That they failed was due to a monumental effort by the Jewish Agency and other Zionist groups who saw the handwriting on the wall.
The parallel is to the illegal immigrants from Mexico who keep coming over the Rio Grande. Your argument is essentially the same thing as trying to give the Immigration and Naturalization Service credit for the nice new jobs the illegal immigrants get in this country, because the INS didn't try hard enough to stop them all.
Unless, of course, you're absurdly suggesting that the Palestinians- who didn't have any say so one way or the other about who got into British Palestine and - should get the credit. Their leader, the Grand Mufti, was an admirer and ally of Hitler, who did his best to do to the Jews in Palestine what Hitler was doing to Jews in Europe.
So you see, anonymous, it's not a question of my being in denial. It's a matter of your having a great deal more reading to do- because as of now, you don't know who the cast of characters was, and who did what.
Much less, again, what you're talking about.
In 1948, the Jews were awarded a small part of Palestine (which had always had a Jewish populartion of some size, BTW). The plan had been for two nations to exist- a Jewish one, and a Palestinian Arab one.
The Palestinian Arab one is called Jordan.
For their part, the Jews were willing that Palestinians living in their borders remain, and enjoy full citizenship with no discrimination whatsoever. But the Arabs- including the Palestinians- were not willing to do that.
The demographic problem arose because the surrounding Arab states
urged the Palestinians to leave, so as to facilitate their invasion of Israel, and the wholesale murder of the Jewish population. The Jews begged the Palestinians to stay, as full equals, citizens, and partners.
They left. But they backed the wrong horse. The Jews won. And under the circumstances, taking back an entire population sworn to murder your wives and children would be problematic for most people.
The borders of Israel expanded as the result of several defensive wars against their Arab neighbors- including the Palestinians- who from the beginning have openly stated their unwillingness to resolve the dispute in any way other than genocide- the mass murder of every Jew in Palestine- and kept trying to achieve precisely that.
The problem is that the Palestinians- a non-native people themselves, whose origins are mostly in the surrounding countries- have never been willing to share
the land with a people they hate, and whose mass murder they vocally
hope for.
Were it not for Palestinian hate, there wouldn't be a problem at all. There would be a nominally Jewish homeland in which Arabs and other non-Jewish citizens would live in peace as equals- as the original Zionists wanted.
The post responding to your comments remind me that a good bit of this is motivated by anti-Israel sentiment as well, see for instance the ranting and raving by the Iranian president.
I happen to know for a fact that some of those strenously denying the holocaust had family members in Germany who were very active Nazis.I don't think they can face the truth of what Nazi Germany was all about.
How can such refined, cultured, civilized people like Germans do such horrrendous things???
The reality of sin in all its ugly reality is hard to deal with. Some choose denial. How good to have instead the Gospel!
It's worth bearing in mind, too, how much anti-Israel sentiment is also motivated by anti-Semitism.
My dad's people came from Counties Antrim and Down. Yours?
The McKanes are a smallish Irish clan and are a bit of an enigma. We know who they are but large bits of their history are still a mystery. There are several reasons for this. There are at least five Gaelic names that are anglicised as McKane and these separate families are sometimes confused with one another. There is also the chaos of Ulster history. So for various reasons these McKanes have largely been missed by the historians� sieve. It has been left to the McKane descendants in the Diaspora to extract this history.
They are native to the Route District of County Antrim, Ireland. Their home parishes are Ballyrashane, Dunluce, Ballyclug and Ballymoney. DNA tests confirm the Route McKanes are a closely related group of Gaelic families that have the same surname and share a common male ancestor who lived circa 1400AD or before.... i.e. they are a classic patronymic Gaelic clan. The Route (An R�ta) is the area between the Bann and the Bush rivers and the valleys of those two rivers. It is a fertile piece of land, rich both in farmlands and fishing.
My grandmother came from Downpatrick, burial place of St. Patrick. As noted elsewhere on this blog, I'm descended from Henry Joy McCracken, one of the leaders of Wolfe Tone's Rebellion and commander of the Irish forces at the Battle of Antrim, who was captured while trying to escape to America afterward, tried, and hanged by the Brits.
Unfortuately, Grandpa (who died while my father was still a boy) converted to Christian Science after a stroke, and Grandma Waters followed suit.
Grandpa Elart was a lapsed Catholic from Schleswig- Holstein. We suspect that he might have been of Danish blood because of the spelling of his name. My grandmother's parents came from Bavaria. They were Lutherans. Odd exchange of geographic localities and religious backgrounds, there.
They died when Grandma was small, and she was raised at the LCMS orphanage in St. Louis.