Glass Joe the Champ said:
Hey guys, I have a really bizarre question to ask. As the title says, imagine if I was one of the crazy people who think the Holocaust was one giant conspiracy, what would you do to try and convince me otherwise.
Keep in mind that I wouldn't be swayed by witnesses or historical accounts because that's all "part of the lie", and I wouldn't be affected by an appeal to logic or reason because I'm clearly insane. You'd need near-irrefutable proof to convince me that history isn't one giant Jewish-controlled conspiracy.
Oh, and sorry if this question is offensive, I just thought it would be an interesting thinking exercise, not trying to offend anyone.
Well, the trick here is to acknowlege some legitimate points being made by holocaust deniers without nessicarly agreeing with all of their conclusions. The simple truth is that there is enough misinformation about the entire thing that the lies and exagerrations involved rapidly get turned into fuel for people with an agenda in claiming the entire thing never happened.
You have to understand that World War II was the last war the US fought more or less correctly, and that involved the usage of war powers, and the control of information. That information control was used to demonize the nazis beyond reality. If you look into the situation you'll find that the War Department went to great lengths to convince people that the Nazis had portable bone grinders, made lampshades out of human skin, and all kinds of other things. Most of these things were debunked despite war department footage, the infamous "human flesh lampshades" taken from "executed jews" on display were actually lamb skin when they were tested... though to be fair it was acknowledged that real human flesh lampshades might exist in private collections, none were ever proven. You look up things like "nazi human flesh lampshades" and you'll find some interesting things out. Likewise you look up people like Ilsa Kochs, you know the inspiration for the infamous exploitation movie "Ilsa She Wolf Of The SS" and the person all those nazi dominatrixs are allegedly based on? Well you'll find out she was never actually convicted when tried for those war crimes, it was acknowlegded that she might have been a repugnant person, but she wasn't a murderer, torturess, or did half the things legends accredited to her. Even her husband's reputation was quite probably exagerrated but I believe he was convicted of crimes less severe than originally brought to bear.
You look at that along with simple questions like how if the Nazis were running death factories where people were being efficiently disposed of, we had all these Jews who were tattooed with markings (long term registration) and managed to survive for years in imprisonment. If they were just packing these guys onto trains, taking them to camps, herding them into gas chambers and/or giant ovens, and then salvaging the usable remains there wouldn't have been any survivors at all, not to mention any need to engage in such tagging and identification, especially if they were being so indiscriminate and rapid with the slaughter that there was no need to be able to diffentiate one prisoner from another... and yeah, it causes LOT of questions about the depiction of the concentration camp most people are taught about.
In reality none of this means that the concentration camps didn't exist, or weren't terrible places where lots of people died. It just means that the legend, which was created for purposes of wartime propaganda (to make slaughtering Nazis more palatable, and so people wouldn't feel guilty afterwards) was considerably worse than the reality, as bad as that happened to be.
As far as I've been able to determine, and it's hard with all of the bunk involved, the concentration camps were pretty much giant work camps where the Nazis really didn't much give a crap about the prisoners or their health. The people there weren't herded off trains and taken directly for execution, as much as they were worked to death under rather inhumane conditions. Rather than a coordinated genocide, it was more a matter of the Nazis not caring if it amounted TO genocide. The whole thing apparently started as a desire to remove the Jews from Germany and german occupied territory, but as the Germans expanded and there became no place to put them they were kind of held and worked to death while people "figured it out" which they were in no rush to do, given that the war was on. This version largely explains most of the inconsistincies like the long term markings, why there were survivors, and numerous other things.
It should also be noted that Nazi Germany was home to a LOT of atrocities committed by people like Doctor Mengele who did collect test subjects (especially twins) from concentration camps. Paticularly freakish guys like that are exagerrated into being a sort of par for the course, rather than being pretty much the worst and most horrific Germany had to offer.
The situation isn't helped by Japan's attitudes which were totally xenocidal, things like their "Unit 731" basically were the murder factories that the concentration camps were accused of being. While this isn't exactly a secret, it's not focused on more because Japan is pretty much under occupation of the US, despite the pretensions of being a free nation the truth is we base a huge amount of our navy there and use it as our major foothold (miltarily) into the eastern world. Given that we're playing a delicate game of occupying a country at gunpoint for purposes of positional advantage, while pretending that this isn't what we're doing, these bits tend to be glossed over, and a lot of the atocities of the Japanese against countries like the Koreans seem to get lumped into the Nazi camp. Except instead of the Japanese torturing thousands of Koreans to death (which I read some stuff about in the afterwards of the Korean Manga "Island", where it explained the inspiration for parts of the story, along with some interesting photographs) we have it replaced with Germans doing it to Jews.
There is no coordinated conspiricy, but I don't doubt that human nature being what it is that many people have jumped on the bandwagon for personal gain, since sympathy is easy to exploit.
The point here isn't that the Jews were not victimized or killed in huge numbers, but to the extent to which it likely happened.
See if your sitting there going on about the excesses of the Nazis flaying people to make handicrafts in organized camps, and herding people directly from trains into gas chambers and such, your arguably being just as ridiculous as a holocaust denier given a lot of the evidence and simple common sense (there were survivors, and a decent number of them, meaning it wasn't a perfect assembly line of murder). Like most arguements the truth lies somewhere in the middle, and as far as I can tell from reading a lot of stuff and listening to claims from various "sides" the middle ground is as I'm describing it. You can usually reason with someone whose a holocaust denier that isn't motivated by religious hatred or bigotry. Trying to say everything claimed by the goverment about the holocaust is true however is barking up the wrong tree, as you can tell by simply looking at the evidence and things that were debunked yet somehow ever bothered to make it into the common awareness (like the human flesh lampshades, and Nazi bone grinders... seriously look that up).
