Reddit reviews KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps

literally any work on the holocaust published in the past decade, you can start with this book

On the concentration camps, for a general overview Nicolaus Wachsmann's KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps is very good.

https://www.amazon.com/KL-History-Nazi-Concentration-Camps/dp/0374535922

That is, at least, how I interpreted the authors words.

THIS IS PART 2. :)

>It is intellectually lazy on the part of denialists to dismiss it out of hand without accounting for the myriad of legitimate reasons for discrepancies to exist.

I agree that some Denialists are idiots and purely driven by hate. I don't get along with a whole bunch of them, and they have their own bullshit they spew (like the "Prophecy of the 6 millon". But there are other, reasonable people who don't think like that that also present legitimate issues. Isn't it intellectually lazy to refuse to even consider those, simply because it is "blasphemy"?

>In short - the historical and logical basis for it is so incredibly flimsy that it is not illogical to assume that people who believe in it do so because they are pre-disposed to an anti-semitic narrative.

What do you think is flimsy for the argument that something "very hard to believe" >didn't< happen the way it is presented?

>Furthermore, this belief system is often propagated by neo-nazi groups who are outspokenly anti-semitic, and I'm always a bit surprised that the conflict of interest is not more obvious to people.

I agree that this doesn't help the issue at all. But there are plenty of other normal rational people who deny aspects of the Holocaust as well. You just don't know them.

>The neo-nazis themselves KNOW that the holocaust happened, and this much is obvious by the fact that they seek for it to happen again. The fact that they universally advocate for genocide reveals this genocide to be inherent to their ideology

That isn't true. It just isn't. I don't want to get sidetracked here, but that is just a gross mis-representation of reality. Even if it is true in some cases, "what some nut jobs think" really has no bearing on the actual facts of the debate.

This is getting long, and thank you if you have made it this far. But I will just leave you with a Denier scenario that doesn't involve anti-semitism.

THEORY - After the war, the Soviets wanted to be able to show "How evil the Facist Imperialists had been" and so they took rumours and perhaps isolated incidents of crazy atrocities and build mockups in many camps so they could take people to show them the "horrors of facism", like a chamber of horrors. This is not unbelievable right? After all, we know the Soviets had no problem with a little bit of "fake propaganda" right? It IS Stalin we are talking about, right? So they started building gas chambers and "neck shot devices" (don't even get me started on the ridiculous "neck shot devices" that you can still go and laugh at at many camps).

Then the Americans got in on the game and installed a few at places like Dachau. Why? Well what difference did it make if there was a little fibbing here or there right? After all .. everyone knows the Nazis were baddies! Interestingly, at that point, the gas chambers weren't really a "jewish" thing. Everybody was just saying that everyone was dying in the gas chambers.

And ... >>SIGNIFICANTLY<< .. if it wasn't for gas chambers then the number one award for "most civilians killed in one place" would go to the Americans for the bombings of Dresden/Hamburg/Nagasaki/Hiroshima. But .. with gas chambers .. "at least we weren't THAT bad!"

Then immediately after the war, Israel was created. It was contentious, and a lot of people weren't cool with this new Jewish homeland being created in the Middle East. But .. from a US/UK perspective, Israel was very valuable. It was the only "100% western ally" in the Mid East. A very valuable geo-political "square on the game board". definitely something that the Western powers would want to keep safe.

But still ... for a long time .. there wasn't really a narrative of the "Jewish Holocaust". The camps and the gas chambers were "for everyone". Lots of people had died. The Jews were among them.

Dachau had been the "big bad concentration camp" at the end of WW2. It was the most famous. They said there had been gassings there. They had witnesses too! But then by the 1960s that had changed to "there might not have been a single gassing at Dachau".

As the years passed >all< of the gas chambers that ended up in West Germany were "downgraded" bit by bit until we end up with some historians even making definitive claims that there had been "no gassings on German soil".

"But" (.. as the story was mutating ..) "the gas chambers were really all over there in the Eastern Bloc!" Of course .. nobody could really go and research those because of the Iron Curtain and all the records were in the hands of the Soviets, who were still claiming things like "4 million people died at Auschwitz".

But even guys like Elie Wiesel, who is one of the major Holocaust writers, wrote his first book about his experiences in Auschwitz and Buchenwald in 1958 ("Night") And even though he mentions that he talked to all kinds of people at Auschwitz, including men from the "Sonderkommando" working the crematoriums .. he does not make a single mention of gas chambers. He does talk about mass killings, but he said Jews were thrown alive onto burning pits. This was another one of the "stories" that had circulated after the war, along with the "mass electrocutions" stories. He goes on to write many more books, but it will be ten more years before he mentions gas chambers.

Then in the late 1960s and 1970s you had a lot of international resistance against Israel. That was the time of the PLO. Israel fought FOUR wars during the 1970s.

And coincidentally, THAT was the time that the real Holocaust narrative started to come out. That's when the "Holocaust / Auschwitz" story really established.

"The U.N. Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide was passed in 1948, yet it would take decades for the popular and academic recognition of the Holocaust as a major event to be memorialized, studied, and taught."source

That was the time that things went from "a lot of Jews died" to "Jews suffered more than ANYBODY!" Even more than the 27 million people that Russia lost, I guess. How was the Jewish 6 million worse than the Russian 27 million? Because of HOW they died. In the most terrible way imaginable. Into the gas chambers of Auschwitz.

So it certainly made sense at that point for everybody to pursue this narrative of "The Jews suffered worse than anybody, so GIVE ISRAEL A BREAK! How can you be critical of Israel? Remember Auschwitz!"

But legitimate questions started to get raised. So that's when the Holocaust denial laws started to be introduced in the 1980s. Then the Iron Curtain started to fall. Poland opened up. And all of the sudden researchers had access to the camps in the East. And since then numbers have been reduced and reduced. Except for the 6 million.

So that's my angle, and the angle of the "moderate Deniers". No anti-semitism. No Jewish World Conspiracy. Just a fib that was told after the war to "make the enemy look worse than myself" that ended up being capitalized on to protect Western geo-political interests in Israel and the Mid East and eventually the story was told and told and told until it became "common knowledge". Like the story about Napoleon being short. (He wasn't.)

And why would so many people go along with it and say they were witnesses? Well .. I just bought a great book on the concentration camps called "KL" (that's the German abbreviation for concentration camp -> KonzentrationsLager. It is a very "pro-Holocaust" book.

but here is something interesting that comes up in the prologue ..

"To give one example of the malleability of memory: As the Auschwitz doctor Josef Mengele gained in notoriety after the war, his face found his way into more an more recollections of prisoners who had never encountered him". So .. that happens. Probably not just with Mengele, right?

Anyways. Blah blah blah. I hope some of that stuff was interesting for you.