25-05-2019, 02:54 AM
I am totally in agreement that the above posting that seemed to deny the Holocaust is offensive. The following are nuances that I have come across randomly that shape my own perspective on the Holocaust.
1. After studying the Civil War records of those who served from Iroquois County, Illinois, I was amazed at the data. The records had two categories: (a) "killed" and (b) "died". Incredibly, it looked like at least 90% "died" and were not "killed". This, to me, says that there had to be a gigantic amount of disease in the Civil War camps. This was apparently an unavoidable consequence (at that time) of having such a large number of strangers living so close together for such a long time. This could have been typhus, smallpox, etc.
2. In one source, I read that the staff of Treblinka ranged in number from 28 to 35. Despite that small number of staff, they murdered 500k to 1Million over a year or so. That was because they had such a fiendishly efficient system. Much of this was because the Germans employed prisoner against prisoner in their murdering.
3. I have read the argument that during the period that the Germans were hunting down Jews, Commissars and other ethnicities on the Eastern Front, that these killings were not any different that the hunting down and killing men, women and children during, say, the Black Hawk War in 1832. But once the Germans set up "factories" for the purpose of mass murder, their crime eclipsed anything in history prior to that, and was all the more criminal and unjustified for any reason. And unprecedented.
4. The idea that Hitler was ignorant of the mass murders is too despicable and stupid to even print. Give me a break.
5. The deaths in the camps were not from typhus, nor did they happen from working people too hard, i.e. to death. The Germans were too scientifically advanced and efficient to "accidently" allow 6 million people to die of typhus or any other preventable disease. And some were worked to death by starvation because that cost less money than to feed them as they worked. That is a a similar logic to that found in "Uncle Tom's Cabin" by Harriet Beecher Stowe in dealing with slave labor in the antebellum south on the part of a few unscrupulous slaveholders. But that wasn't prevalent in the South IMHO. And young babies were murdered too and we know that. And they weren't workers.
6. I have seen the saying that (1)Goebbels saw the murder of the Jews as a culture war, that (2) Goering saw it as mainly a financial effort to loot the property of the Jews and (3) Hitler saw it as [essentially] a war against the Jews, a civil war in which only one side had any weapons. Since Hitler had endured the horror of World War I in the trenches, one could understand if Hitler thought that not only soldiers should suffer such horrors. But in World War I, only less than 10% of the dead were civilians, while in World War II, 85% of the deaths were civilians. And that was thanks to only one man and his name was Hitler. In fairness, there were others in World War II who shared some partial blame for burning, bombing and nuking women and children merely for the purpose of terror and nothing more.
But the horrible spectre of mass death was begun by Hitler and promoted mainly by Hitler and his very close friends and associates. No Hitler, no World War II (as we know it). As an aside, I should mention that the Japanese committed atrocities against the Chinese almost as bad as the crimes of the Germans. Barbaric, but not on the same scale.
In my mind, the story of the Holocaust is basically accurate as reported by almost all WWII historians. And the more you know about A. Hitler, the worse one's opinion of him becomes.
James Lateer
1. After studying the Civil War records of those who served from Iroquois County, Illinois, I was amazed at the data. The records had two categories: (a) "killed" and (b) "died". Incredibly, it looked like at least 90% "died" and were not "killed". This, to me, says that there had to be a gigantic amount of disease in the Civil War camps. This was apparently an unavoidable consequence (at that time) of having such a large number of strangers living so close together for such a long time. This could have been typhus, smallpox, etc.
2. In one source, I read that the staff of Treblinka ranged in number from 28 to 35. Despite that small number of staff, they murdered 500k to 1Million over a year or so. That was because they had such a fiendishly efficient system. Much of this was because the Germans employed prisoner against prisoner in their murdering.
3. I have read the argument that during the period that the Germans were hunting down Jews, Commissars and other ethnicities on the Eastern Front, that these killings were not any different that the hunting down and killing men, women and children during, say, the Black Hawk War in 1832. But once the Germans set up "factories" for the purpose of mass murder, their crime eclipsed anything in history prior to that, and was all the more criminal and unjustified for any reason. And unprecedented.
4. The idea that Hitler was ignorant of the mass murders is too despicable and stupid to even print. Give me a break.
5. The deaths in the camps were not from typhus, nor did they happen from working people too hard, i.e. to death. The Germans were too scientifically advanced and efficient to "accidently" allow 6 million people to die of typhus or any other preventable disease. And some were worked to death by starvation because that cost less money than to feed them as they worked. That is a a similar logic to that found in "Uncle Tom's Cabin" by Harriet Beecher Stowe in dealing with slave labor in the antebellum south on the part of a few unscrupulous slaveholders. But that wasn't prevalent in the South IMHO. And young babies were murdered too and we know that. And they weren't workers.
6. I have seen the saying that (1)Goebbels saw the murder of the Jews as a culture war, that (2) Goering saw it as mainly a financial effort to loot the property of the Jews and (3) Hitler saw it as [essentially] a war against the Jews, a civil war in which only one side had any weapons. Since Hitler had endured the horror of World War I in the trenches, one could understand if Hitler thought that not only soldiers should suffer such horrors. But in World War I, only less than 10% of the dead were civilians, while in World War II, 85% of the deaths were civilians. And that was thanks to only one man and his name was Hitler. In fairness, there were others in World War II who shared some partial blame for burning, bombing and nuking women and children merely for the purpose of terror and nothing more.
But the horrible spectre of mass death was begun by Hitler and promoted mainly by Hitler and his very close friends and associates. No Hitler, no World War II (as we know it). As an aside, I should mention that the Japanese committed atrocities against the Chinese almost as bad as the crimes of the Germans. Barbaric, but not on the same scale.
In my mind, the story of the Holocaust is basically accurate as reported by almost all WWII historians. And the more you know about A. Hitler, the worse one's opinion of him becomes.
James Lateer