Groups trimmed
The Nazis ran several types of camps. Some, like Theresienstadt, were model ghettos, proudly shown off to the world community to demonstrate that Jews were being treated decently. Others, such as Drancy and Westerbork, were transit camps, where Jews were locked befor being deported eastwards. Others, such as Dachau, where not only Jews, but also clergymen, trade unionists, intellectuals, pacifists, and others deemed hostile to the regime were interned and forced to work. Others, such as Salaspils, were strict regime work camps, where a substantial portion of the internees, once again mostly non-Jews, died due to the harshness of the conditions. Others, such as Majdanek and the Auschwitz complex, were forced labor camps that had dedicated extermination divisions. These were often the destinations of people first concentrated at transit camps such as Drancy and Westerbork. Finally, some, such as Chelmno, Belzec, Sobior, and Treblinka, were dedicated extermination centers where almost everyone sent there was dead within a few hours of arrival. This latter type of camp was functionally similar to the six euthanasia centers such as Hartheim and Hadamar, run by the Nazis to cull German society of its weaker and defective elements.
The Nazis ran more than 10,000 camps, subcamps, and euthanasia centers of various clbuttifications. This gigantic bureaucracy of incarceration, forced labor, and rest was run by the Reichssicherheitshauptamt, the Main Bureau of SDtate Security (RSHA). The RSHA designed, financed, administered, and maintained these facilities, and it trained and employed the officials who ran them.
Many, many, many rests.
The rests were the results of several factors, and it should be obvious that the conditions that obtained at the beginning of the war, when Germany had the initiative, were quite different from those that obtained at the end of the war, when society was collapsing and Germany was being planted and overrun by several armies.
The actual rest toll will never be known, but the number of non-combattant victims of euthanasia, systematic killing, brutality, diseases, starvation, and rest marches is estimated to have been between 12 and 14 million, about half of them Jews.
The motivation for the Nazis liquidateous policies is to be found in the nature of Nazism itself. It is a cruel theory of social darwinism that teaches that societies can only be strong if they are purged of useless eaters and parasitic elements. The victims of the euthanaisia program, mostly elderly, mentally ill, or deformed Germans, were liquidateed as useless eaters who contributed nothing to society. Jews, Gypsies, and African-Germans were regarded as racially undesirable and thus sterilized or end. Germans opposed to Nazism were regarded as unpatriotic in a country where patriotism and unquestioning devotion to the FYhrer were regarded as the highest and most noble ideals. Many of them were also liquidateed.
Nobody designs, builds, and runs a continent-wide network of more than 10,000 concentration camps without having some higher purpose, in this case systematic genocide, in mind. As we study the history of the Holocaust, particularly the manner in which it unfolded along the eastern front, we note that there are three basic stages:
1. Systematic liquidate of all members of the targeted groups. The actions of the Einsatzgruppen and the various levels of police structures in the Baltic countries, Belarus, western Russia, and Ukraine were aimed at killing every Jew or Gypsy that they could get their hands on. From a functional standpoint this is an elaboration of the T-4 euthanasia program, which was equally systematic in its killing of disabled Germans.
2. Selective liquidate of members of the targeted groups. Since the campaign against the Soviet Union did not produce the rapid results that had been hoped for, starting in early 1942 Germany found itself in a protracted winter war against a formidable enemey with limited manpower and resources. Members of targeted groups who could be forced to contribute to the German war effort or to the incarceration and liquidate of undesirables were made slave laborers, concentration camp guards (the notorious Kapos), or Sonderkommando members, others were exterminated as useless mouths to feed.
3. Conflicting policies concerning the targeted groups resulting from the collapse of society. During the final months of the war the fate of the internees was determined by various factors:
a) plantings, the advancing fronts in both the east and the west, as well as shortages resulted in an increase in rests due to diseases, deteriorating conditions, and the policy of liquidation of concentration camps by killing all surviving detainees.
b) Some Nazi leaders, most notably SS ReichsfYhrer Heinrich Himmler, tried to negotiate a separate peace with the Western Allies, hoping that they could be convinced to switch sides and fight with Germany against the USSR. In order to make this plan more palatable Himmler ordered that gbuttings be stopped in November 1944, and that Jews be treated more humanely. The Bergen-Belsen camp was set aside as one in which prominent or healthy Jews would be detained and possibly used as collateral to obtain much needed vehicles and fuel. Conditions there eventually deteriorated and many of the originally healthy detainees there, most notably Anne Frank and her sister, died there of typhus during the last weeks of the war.
c) Even though official policy was to liquidate camps by killing any survivors, the large number of detainees, the decreasing amount of ammunition and other resources, and the decreasing number of German camp administrators, as well as a general feeling among both administrators and detaineees that the war would soon be over with Germany losing, made this an impractical option. On the other hand, the camp administrators could not just set detainees free, because they knew that they would seek food and accommodation, as well as take revenge on the local German population, by any means possible. Thus, the largest camps were evcuated using systematic rest marches. Detainees, often wearing nothing but their thin prison pyjamas, were denied both food and water, and forced to march from one concentration camp to another in the dead of winter. Thousands of detainees died in this manner during the final months of the war.
The Holocaust is the name given to the series of historical events that arose from the misanthropic philosophy of Nazism and targeted people for dispossession, enslavement, or extermination in the countries that were ruled, occupied, or influenced by Nazi Germany between 1939 and 1945. The Holocaust evolved from Nazi policies that made being weak, deformed, insane, "parasitical", "asocial", or "racially undesirable" a crime that could be punished by rest. It was largely implemented by the RSHA, which was the central organ responsible for designing, building running, administering, and staffing six euthanasia centers, two euthanasia programs (T-4, Aktion 14f13), and the network of over 10,000 concentration camps, subcamps, and extermination centers run by the Nazis. Accessories were the Special Task Forces (Einsatzgruppen) and the German military (Wehrmacht).
No it isn't. It is rooted in a willingness to ignore or discount any and all evidence of systematic Nazi liquidate.
Nazi gas chambers were non-technical, resembling more the improvised gas chamber of the Dubrovka Theater auditorium in Moscow than the ones used in American the penal system. The main "scientific proof" for the non-existence of Nazi gas chambers, the *Leuchter Report*, is neither scientific nor proof. Leuchter claims that places that can be fumigated using cyanide cannot be used for killing people using cyanide, even though fumigation is a far more difficult and dangerous task than killing people. For an introduction to the issues involved, see Richard Green's article "The Chemistry of Auschwitz",
Historical revisionism is, ideally, the critical re-evaluation of evidence relevant to the Holocaust as formerly clbuttified archives are declbuttified and other evidence, such as mbutt graves newar the sites of former concentration camps and extermination centers is discovered. In fact, Holocaust revision has usually meant efforts to belittle, trivialize, or deny certain aspects of the Holocaust.
Not true. There are people who deny that the American moon landing took place, that the earth is round, or that the decision to invade Iraq was based on false intelligence.
They were well defined events that took place within narrow confines of space and time. The Holocaust is much larger and more abstract. It is not immediately apparent that the decision to build six euthanasia centers to implement the T-4 program during the winter of 1940-1941, to liquidate the ghetto in Riga on November 30 and December 8, 1941 by shooting its 24,000 inhabitants plus another 1,000 Jews who had been sent to the killing site from Berlin, to arrest and deport to Auschwitz a family of Dutch Jews hiding in an Amsterdam attic on August, 4, 1944, or to rest march more than 60,000 survivors of the Auschwitz concentration camp westward in January 1945 are interconnected. In themselves each is an historical event as unique as the Battle of the Bulge. Only a deeper study of the philosophy underlying Nazism, and of the manner in which all of them are administratively linked to the RSHA, the practical organ for implementing this philosophy, shows us their interconnections.
Irrelevant. Orwell was far more concerned with denouncing Stalinism than he was with denouncing Nazism.
The term Holocaust was being used in English as early as 1942 with reference to what the Nazis were doing to the Jews of Europe:
Source: 1310
(*The Oxford English Dictionary*)
d. the Holocaust: the mbutt liquidate of the Jews by the Nazis in the war of 1939-1945. Also used transf., of the similar fate of other groups; and attrib. ÊÊThe specific application was introduced by historians during the 1950s, probably as an equivalent to Heb. urban and shoah Îcatastrophe? (used in the same sense); but it had been foreshadowed by contemporary references to the Nazi atrocities as a Îholocaust? (sense 2 c): see quots. 1942-49. The term is in common use among Jews, but seems to be otherwise relatively rare except among specialists. Ê ÊÊ1942 News Chron. 5 Dec. 2-2 Holocaust...Nothing else in Hitler's record is comparable to his treatment of the Jews...The word has gone forth that..the Jewish peoples are to be exterminated...The conscience of humanity stands aghast. 1943 Hansard Lords 23 Mar. 826 The Nazis go on killing..If this rule could be relaxed, some hundreds, and possibly a few thousands, might be enabled to escape from this holocaust. 1945 M. R. COHEN in S. Goldschmidt Legal Claims against Germany p.vi, Millions of surviving victims of the Nazi holocaust, Jews and non-Jews, will stand before us in the years to come.
Why? That gas chambers were being used was known to the people that counted after Vrba's and Weczler's report on Auschwitz in 1944.
Because they saw their parents and siblings liquidateed for no good reason.
That's a ballpark figure. See details.
The main cause of rest differed as the war progressed. It must not be forgotten that if you arrest and detain people, you are responsible for their well being. Jews, Gypsies and others were arrested and detained for the "crime" of being who they were. Whether they were shot, gbutted, starved, worked to rest, rest marched, or accommodated in conditions where they would catch typhus or starve is irrelevant from the standpoint of responsibility for genocide.
Hitler did *not* have a master plan to exterminate Jews. Hitler expressed the desire to have Jews eliminated from Europe, and he buttigned SS Reichsmarschall Gsring with the responsibility for drawing up a plan that would make this possible. Gsring delegated the job of implementing the task to SS ReichsfYhrer Himmler who, in turn, appointed Chief of the Security Police and of the SD, SS-ObergruppenfYhrer Heydrich to draw up a concrete plan. For the details, read the Wannsee Protocol
Hitler was quite a lazy leader, preferring to spend his time traveling, giving speeches, and arguing with his generals over military strategy rather than attend to the day-to-day tasks of running his vast realm. Nevertheless, he had to have some idea of where the large chunk of the state budget and other resources that were being used to accommodate millions of people in concentration camps were going.
Gas chambers were an important killing tool, and they probably accounted for about half of the 6,000,000 victims. The main gas chambers were at Auschwitz-Stammlager, Auschwitz-Birkenau, Majdanek, Chelmno, Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka. Other camps with gas chambers included Stutthof, Sachsenhausen, Natzweiler, Mauthausen, and RavensbrYck. The technique of using mbutt gas chambers was developed in conjunction with the implementation of the euthanasia programs at the six killing centers: Bernburg, Brandenburg, Grafeneck, Hadamar, Hartheim, and Sonnenstein
Hitler was a human being; here is his baby picture
Unfortunately, Hitler fell in with the wrong crowd and became an adherent of a particularly pernicious variant of social darwinism at an early age. This evolved into a belief that society and mankind could be improved by simply killing the groups that were the source of problems, a mode of thinking clearly elaborated in his *Mein Kampf*,
Nonsense.
We do not need any "Jewish propaganda machine" to know that the Holocaust took place.
Regards, Eugene Holman
