Below are my and Thomas Dalton's opening statements for this debate. It should be noted that these are "cold" openings; neither of us wrote our statements in response to the statement of the other. Two rounds of rebuttal will follow in the days and weeks to come.
I am writing to let you all know that I noticed and corrected a typographical error in an earlier version concerning the date of Robert Ley's speech, which I cite above.
This was a typo (the misdate was the product of a copy-and-paste error, and in any case the specific date of the speech-May 20 1942 vs 3 May1943- had no bearing on my argument). But I thought I should flag the correction.
In Lodz there is so-called Ghetto Field, where over 40,000 victims of Lodz ghetto (totally 200,000 Jews were imprisoned there) are buried. Victims were buried in individual graves and thanks to detailed records from the time of ghettoe function names and place of burial of vast majority of victims is known).
I love to just analyze the idea that if the holocaust really did happen that it would mean that on average the Nazis gassed and then cremated (because there is no bodies) an average of 3000 Jews per day to reach the figure of 6 million. No matter if some days there was 40k Jews and some days there was 4 - the idea itself is completely absurd. What is your holocaust affirming response to this? Some sort of list of names or because your stating it doesn't prove it's wrong argument.
Also a document saying Ausrotten is not a document stating "it's NSDAP policy to gas Jews in homicidal chambers" - this idea is such a farfetched reach it's unreal. Oh look I found the word kill next to Jew in NSDAP therefore that means that it was Nazi policy to homicidally gas Jews in chambers with zyklon b. No I'm sorry that's absurd.
ausrotten/ausrottung comes from the german bible. it means to root out, or seperate. there are much better words to say 'exterminate' in german. when the official state policy is to root out and seperate the jews, youre gonna encounter that word alot.
Terms can develop different meanings over time, regardless of etymology.
In German, ausrotten connotes "to exterminate".
By the way in Himmler's Second Posen Speech (cited in my piece above), he literally defines "ausrotten" as "to kill them or have them killed" (“umzubringen, oder umbringen zu lassen”). So you are completely out of luck.
i am saying that it is a much more appropriate word than ausrotten or any of its derivations. as i had mentioned before, if he wanted to say kill, he'd use a word like that, not ausrottung, which clearly means uproot, same as in the bible.
Luther Bible 1912
Leviticus 17:9
und bring't nicht vor die Tür der Hütte des Stifts, daß er's dem HERRN tue, der soll ausgerottet werden von seinem Volk.
Leviticus 17:10
Und Welcher mensch, er sei vom Haus Israel oder ein Fremdling
unter euch, irgend Blut ißt, wider den will ich mein Antlitz setzen und will ihn mitten aus seinem Volk ausrotten.
English KJV
Leviticus 17:9
And bringeth it not unto the door of the tabernacle of the congregation, to offer it unto the LORD; even that man shall be cut off from among his people.
Leviticus 17:10
And whatsoever man there be of the house of Israel, or of the strangers that sojourn among you, that eateth any manner of blood; I will even set my face against that soul that eateth blood, and will cut him off from among his people.
I am thinking now of the evacuation of the Jews, the extirpation ["Ausrottung"] of the Jewish people. It is one of those things that's easy to say: "The Jewish people will be extirpated" ["wird ausgerottet"], says every Party comrade, "that's quite clear, it's in our programme: elimination ["Ausschaltung"] of the Jews, extirpation ["Ausrottung"]; that's what we're doing."
Oct 6:
The question came up: Well, what about the women and children? — I came to a determinedly simple conclusion about that, too. I did not believe that I had the right to wipe out ["auszurotten"] the men — rather I should say, kill ["umzubringen"] them or have them killed — and let their children grow up to avenge themselves on our sons and grandsons.
See how he emphasizes the word umzubringen to explictly mean he means killing? it connotes that ausrottung/ausrotten/auszurotten in its typical usage, does not refer to killing, but rather the uprooting/removal of. He also says he didn't believe he had the right to kill them. Later on in that speech, he says that the plan (final solution) had been accomplished. Yet jews were still alive. If final solution meant genocide, and jews were still alive, how could it have been accomplished? its because the final solution always referred to deportations of jews from german lands, and that is what was accomplished.
"I am thinking now of the evacuation of the Jews, the extirpation of the Jewish people. It is one of those things that's easy to say: "The Jewish people will be extirpated" , says every Party comrade, "that's quite clear, it's in our programme: elimination of the Jews, extirpation ; that's what we're doing." And then they all come along, these 80 million good Germans, and every one of them has his decent Jew. Of course, it's quite clear that the others are pigs, but this one is one first-class Jew. Of all those who speak this way, not one has looked on; not one has lived through it. Most of you know what it means when 100 bodies lie together, when 500 lie there, or if 1,000 lie there. To have gone through this, and at the same time, apart from exceptions caused by human weaknesses, to have remained decent, that has made us hard. This is a chapter of glory in our history which has never been written, and which never shall be written; since we know how hard it would be for us if we still had the Jews, as secret saboteurs, agitators, and slander-mongers, among us now, in every city — during the bombing raids, with the suffering and deprivations of the war. We would probably already be in the same situation as in 1916/17 if we still had the Jews in the body of the German people."
see, i can do that too. german people arent genocidal, whereas jewish people are. hitler's generals refused his direct command to execute murderous bolshevik commissars, because they considered it dishonorable. but suddenly theyre ok with genociding civilians? im sorry, but that is ridiculous.
One would think that if the Holocaust was made up to benefit Israel why neither the U.S. nor U.S.S.R. during the Cold War came out and said "fuck it, this didn't happen, stop complaining" when each came to blows with it, particularly during the Suez crisis when Israel lacked the nuclear capability to defend itself from American/Soviet attack. Or how the U.S. withdrew its initial endorsement for the UNGA plan establishing a Jewish state. Or how the U.S.S.R. turned sharply against Israel from the 1950s onwards...
Yeah they not only have zero evidence for their "hoax," but cannot even explain why the US or USSR or Britain or whoever was behind the "hoax" would be rationally motivated to take such a colossal reputation risk. Nazis were already discredited for starting the war.
I'm actually planning on asking him about this in the rebuttal, whether he still thinks it is not a hoax (but somehow believes all judicial bodies, western nations, western historians, etc, came to believe in it), as he wrote in his book.
The way he's arguing here definitely frames it as a hoax. The 'history of the six million' newspaper articles thing is implying that the number (and the Holocaust) was a conscious fabrication. And he clearly implies it's a hoax in his discussion about Jewish groups.
Being synonymous with religiosity, the "six million" number served as religious imprimatur for their return to the land they dub "Israel" (lit. Palestine). Using jewish "bible code", known as "Gematria" - a form of numerology associated with jewish mysticism (Kabbalah), and used to interpret "secret" messages within the text of the Torah, the rabbis managed to etch the "six million" number into the jewish psyche. Aided by the peoples' infamous, synonymous trope of victimhood, this sacrifice of "six million" became the proof of prophetic, divine fulfilment. They specifically accomplished this by availing to a particular biblical passage - Leviticus 25:10, that contained the key phrase: "Ye Shall Return".
In it's original Hebrew spelling, the word "Return" was misspelt, i.e. the sixth letter of the Hebrew alphabet (Vav) was missing from the word "Return" (transliteration: "SHWB"). The missing letter was then interpreted by rabbinical scholars to connote "without six", i.e. "without six" [million people]. In addition to this inventive construal, to make the rabbis' eisegesis (scriptual exposition made to suit pre-existing postulates) seem more credible, the Hebrew word for "Desolation", "SHOAH" (SHWA) was also opportunely derived - by using the fifth letter of the Hebrew alphabet, instead of the sixth (Vav). So the resulting interpretation of this bible passage became: 'Ye Shall Return without six million lives, after the shoah'.
tldr: for thousands of years this typo existed in the so-called inerrant word of god, so the rabbis needed to provide some justification to it's existance and that is where the six million number comes from. if the number is not six million, either a) the bible is not perfect and it was a mistake, or b) their god was wrong about their return to israel. so, for them, it had to be six million.
It wouldn't matter if it was initially a "hoax", per the essay Dalton believes vested interests have an incentive to uphold a certain narrative, yet there's no reason the Americans or Soviets couldn't have blown the whole thing open in the aforementioned time periods.
Firstly, allied nations ended up believing in their own propaganda. They really believed in this grand conspiracy theory about their enemy.
Allied nations did not of course have interest to tarnish their reputations by doing some impartial research if this conspiracy theory had any real evidence. Allied nations wanted to see themselves as heroes. What is so weird about that?
many individuals did come forward, Dr. Charles Larson did autopsies on bodies from dachau and twenty other camps and found none were killed by poisonous gas, despite being on the US Judge Advocate General's investigation team for war crimes, his findings were withheld from the defense at nuremberg. he said the deaths were due to typhus and starvation. do you know what a typhus victim looks like? exactly like what a concentration camp inmate looks like. look up the typhus cases of Andersonville (civil war prison). there were memos inside the military which said similar things, they treated the idea as a crazy conspiracy theory. i vaguely remember an internal memo from british intelligence saying the holocaust was a post-war invention or something along those lines (i could be wrong on this one). the whole holocaust narrative didnt really even come to fruition until decades later. initially they tried to say it was steam chambers and electrified floors, not gas chambers. it wasnt until much later that the gas chamber narrative took hold. Rudolf Vrba was the guy who popularized the gas chamber idea, and during the Zundel trial he was forced to admit under oath he had never witnessed any such thing and that his stories were "artistic representations".
the us government did do exactly that though. in the beginning it was alleged that all of the concentration camps were extermination camps. but the us investigated all of the camps it liberated and found that not to be the case. all of the so-called "extermination" camps it turns out, were in the soviet occupation zone, and could not be investigated by the west for many years. why send a hundred thousand french jews all the way across europe if youre just going to kill them, who knows.. it makes much more sense that after the haavara agreement and madagascar plan fell through wannsee's final solution was simply jewish resettlements in the east, where, eventually, they would serve to act as a buffer between the then-communist russia and the germans.
Except no one alleges that anyone was gassed at Dachau, at least not in appreciable numbers, so it's not surprising that was his finding. There's a difference between outsiders initially coming across a bunch of camps with corpses and half-alive people all over the place and colloquially referring to them as "death camps" and facilities purpose-made for killing people. The Cold War and Stalinization of Eastern and Central Europe did not really begin until 1947 so the Western Allies had ample to time to disprove the existence of death camps/gas chambers in Poland, and for what it's worth homicidal gas chambers were discovered by the West, such as at Mauthausen and Natzweiler-Struthof.
It makes no sense for the Nazis to have resettled Jews considering the German government banned Jewish emigration in October 1941, and the Korherr report describes a decrease in the Jewish population of Europe through a combination of natural deaths, decreases in fertility, emigration, and "special treatment" through 1942. Where did they go?
most jews fled. soviet policy prioritized evacuating jews. many ended up in random places like kazakhstan. many tried to fight, and died. which specific jews are you talking about?
I don't care when it became culturally relevant. If anything that's an argument against denial since it would have made more sense to talk about it when Zionism was being debated.
Uhh my point is that no one knew what "the holocaust" was, and it was therefore not "talked about" when zionism was being debated. The extent of "the holocaust" was built up over many decades of folk tales so, when the Balfour declaration was drafted, only some vague persecution and execution of jews was considered, something few could dispute for political leverage.
Also, this idea of Americans or Soviets having some reason to oppose forming a relationship with people who could colonize the middle east for them is baseless and counter-intuitive. Americans and Soviets would have had every reason to invent the holocaust narrative.
The only way you'd get numerous eyewitnesses and accused perpetrators to confess such in court is through conspiracy/coercion.
And the U.S. and U.S.S.R. did come to blows with Israel, particularly during the Suez crisis, yet neither stated there was no genocide despite being furious with Israel and Israel being unable to then do anything about it.
I am writing to let you all know that I noticed and corrected a typographical error in an earlier version concerning the date of Robert Ley's speech, which I cite above.
This was a typo (the misdate was the product of a copy-and-paste error, and in any case the specific date of the speech-May 20 1942 vs 3 May1943- had no bearing on my argument). But I thought I should flag the correction.
In Lodz there is so-called Ghetto Field, where over 40,000 victims of Lodz ghetto (totally 200,000 Jews were imprisoned there) are buried. Victims were buried in individual graves and thanks to detailed records from the time of ghettoe function names and place of burial of vast majority of victims is known).
Could that just be a graveyard...
Mike didn't back out of the debate.
I love to just analyze the idea that if the holocaust really did happen that it would mean that on average the Nazis gassed and then cremated (because there is no bodies) an average of 3000 Jews per day to reach the figure of 6 million. No matter if some days there was 40k Jews and some days there was 4 - the idea itself is completely absurd. What is your holocaust affirming response to this? Some sort of list of names or because your stating it doesn't prove it's wrong argument.
Also a document saying Ausrotten is not a document stating "it's NSDAP policy to gas Jews in homicidal chambers" - this idea is such a farfetched reach it's unreal. Oh look I found the word kill next to Jew in NSDAP therefore that means that it was Nazi policy to homicidally gas Jews in chambers with zyklon b. No I'm sorry that's absurd.
ausrotten/ausrottung comes from the german bible. it means to root out, or seperate. there are much better words to say 'exterminate' in german. when the official state policy is to root out and seperate the jews, youre gonna encounter that word alot.
In multiple quotes I cited, the word "kill" (umbringen, totschlagen) is used.
The most direct translation of annihilate in German is "vernichten," and that is also used in many of the quotes I use.
"Ausrotten" is best translated as "exterminate," regardless of the etymological origins.
it isnt best translated as exterminate, aus-rotten etymologically, quite literally means out-root, or in english, root-out.
Terms can develop different meanings over time, regardless of etymology.
In German, ausrotten connotes "to exterminate".
By the way in Himmler's Second Posen Speech (cited in my piece above), he literally defines "ausrotten" as "to kill them or have them killed" (“umzubringen, oder umbringen zu lassen”). So you are completely out of luck.
umzubringen literally means to kill oneself btw
lol no it doesn't. "Umbringen" mean "kill" and "umzubringen" (with the prefix "zu") meant "to kill." Stop making shit up.
i am saying that it is a much more appropriate word than ausrotten or any of its derivations. as i had mentioned before, if he wanted to say kill, he'd use a word like that, not ausrottung, which clearly means uproot, same as in the bible.
Luther Bible 1912
Leviticus 17:9
und bring't nicht vor die Tür der Hütte des Stifts, daß er's dem HERRN tue, der soll ausgerottet werden von seinem Volk.
Leviticus 17:10
Und Welcher mensch, er sei vom Haus Israel oder ein Fremdling
unter euch, irgend Blut ißt, wider den will ich mein Antlitz setzen und will ihn mitten aus seinem Volk ausrotten.
English KJV
Leviticus 17:9
And bringeth it not unto the door of the tabernacle of the congregation, to offer it unto the LORD; even that man shall be cut off from among his people.
Leviticus 17:10
And whatsoever man there be of the house of Israel, or of the strangers that sojourn among you, that eateth any manner of blood; I will even set my face against that soul that eateth blood, and will cut him off from among his people.
Oct 4:
I am thinking now of the evacuation of the Jews, the extirpation ["Ausrottung"] of the Jewish people. It is one of those things that's easy to say: "The Jewish people will be extirpated" ["wird ausgerottet"], says every Party comrade, "that's quite clear, it's in our programme: elimination ["Ausschaltung"] of the Jews, extirpation ["Ausrottung"]; that's what we're doing."
Oct 6:
The question came up: Well, what about the women and children? — I came to a determinedly simple conclusion about that, too. I did not believe that I had the right to wipe out ["auszurotten"] the men — rather I should say, kill ["umzubringen"] them or have them killed — and let their children grow up to avenge themselves on our sons and grandsons.
See how he emphasizes the word umzubringen to explictly mean he means killing? it connotes that ausrottung/ausrotten/auszurotten in its typical usage, does not refer to killing, but rather the uprooting/removal of. He also says he didn't believe he had the right to kill them. Later on in that speech, he says that the plan (final solution) had been accomplished. Yet jews were still alive. If final solution meant genocide, and jews were still alive, how could it have been accomplished? its because the final solution always referred to deportations of jews from german lands, and that is what was accomplished.
"I am thinking now of the evacuation of the Jews, the extirpation of the Jewish people. It is one of those things that's easy to say: "The Jewish people will be extirpated" , says every Party comrade, "that's quite clear, it's in our programme: elimination of the Jews, extirpation ; that's what we're doing." And then they all come along, these 80 million good Germans, and every one of them has his decent Jew. Of course, it's quite clear that the others are pigs, but this one is one first-class Jew. Of all those who speak this way, not one has looked on; not one has lived through it. Most of you know what it means when 100 bodies lie together, when 500 lie there, or if 1,000 lie there. To have gone through this, and at the same time, apart from exceptions caused by human weaknesses, to have remained decent, that has made us hard. This is a chapter of glory in our history which has never been written, and which never shall be written; since we know how hard it would be for us if we still had the Jews, as secret saboteurs, agitators, and slander-mongers, among us now, in every city — during the bombing raids, with the suffering and deprivations of the war. We would probably already be in the same situation as in 1916/17 if we still had the Jews in the body of the German people."
see, i can do that too. german people arent genocidal, whereas jewish people are. hitler's generals refused his direct command to execute murderous bolshevik commissars, because they considered it dishonorable. but suddenly theyre ok with genociding civilians? im sorry, but that is ridiculous.
One would think that if the Holocaust was made up to benefit Israel why neither the U.S. nor U.S.S.R. during the Cold War came out and said "fuck it, this didn't happen, stop complaining" when each came to blows with it, particularly during the Suez crisis when Israel lacked the nuclear capability to defend itself from American/Soviet attack. Or how the U.S. withdrew its initial endorsement for the UNGA plan establishing a Jewish state. Or how the U.S.S.R. turned sharply against Israel from the 1950s onwards...
Yeah they not only have zero evidence for their "hoax," but cannot even explain why the US or USSR or Britain or whoever was behind the "hoax" would be rationally motivated to take such a colossal reputation risk. Nazis were already discredited for starting the war.
Your strawmen are pathetic. Thomas Dalton in his books:
"in my opinion, the Holocaust was not a hoax."
- Debating the Holocaust
"the ‘fabrication’ claim is not a key aspect of any important revisionist work today."
- The Holocaust: An Introduction
I'm actually planning on asking him about this in the rebuttal, whether he still thinks it is not a hoax (but somehow believes all judicial bodies, western nations, western historians, etc, came to believe in it), as he wrote in his book.
The way he's arguing here definitely frames it as a hoax. The 'history of the six million' newspaper articles thing is implying that the number (and the Holocaust) was a conscious fabrication. And he clearly implies it's a hoax in his discussion about Jewish groups.
Being synonymous with religiosity, the "six million" number served as religious imprimatur for their return to the land they dub "Israel" (lit. Palestine). Using jewish "bible code", known as "Gematria" - a form of numerology associated with jewish mysticism (Kabbalah), and used to interpret "secret" messages within the text of the Torah, the rabbis managed to etch the "six million" number into the jewish psyche. Aided by the peoples' infamous, synonymous trope of victimhood, this sacrifice of "six million" became the proof of prophetic, divine fulfilment. They specifically accomplished this by availing to a particular biblical passage - Leviticus 25:10, that contained the key phrase: "Ye Shall Return".
In it's original Hebrew spelling, the word "Return" was misspelt, i.e. the sixth letter of the Hebrew alphabet (Vav) was missing from the word "Return" (transliteration: "SHWB"). The missing letter was then interpreted by rabbinical scholars to connote "without six", i.e. "without six" [million people]. In addition to this inventive construal, to make the rabbis' eisegesis (scriptual exposition made to suit pre-existing postulates) seem more credible, the Hebrew word for "Desolation", "SHOAH" (SHWA) was also opportunely derived - by using the fifth letter of the Hebrew alphabet, instead of the sixth (Vav). So the resulting interpretation of this bible passage became: 'Ye Shall Return without six million lives, after the shoah'.
tldr: for thousands of years this typo existed in the so-called inerrant word of god, so the rabbis needed to provide some justification to it's existance and that is where the six million number comes from. if the number is not six million, either a) the bible is not perfect and it was a mistake, or b) their god was wrong about their return to israel. so, for them, it had to be six million.
It wouldn't matter if it was initially a "hoax", per the essay Dalton believes vested interests have an incentive to uphold a certain narrative, yet there's no reason the Americans or Soviets couldn't have blown the whole thing open in the aforementioned time periods.
Firstly, allied nations ended up believing in their own propaganda. They really believed in this grand conspiracy theory about their enemy.
Allied nations did not of course have interest to tarnish their reputations by doing some impartial research if this conspiracy theory had any real evidence. Allied nations wanted to see themselves as heroes. What is so weird about that?
So why did the Allies discredit their human soap claims, or the WWI propaganda claims for that matter?
many individuals did come forward, Dr. Charles Larson did autopsies on bodies from dachau and twenty other camps and found none were killed by poisonous gas, despite being on the US Judge Advocate General's investigation team for war crimes, his findings were withheld from the defense at nuremberg. he said the deaths were due to typhus and starvation. do you know what a typhus victim looks like? exactly like what a concentration camp inmate looks like. look up the typhus cases of Andersonville (civil war prison). there were memos inside the military which said similar things, they treated the idea as a crazy conspiracy theory. i vaguely remember an internal memo from british intelligence saying the holocaust was a post-war invention or something along those lines (i could be wrong on this one). the whole holocaust narrative didnt really even come to fruition until decades later. initially they tried to say it was steam chambers and electrified floors, not gas chambers. it wasnt until much later that the gas chamber narrative took hold. Rudolf Vrba was the guy who popularized the gas chamber idea, and during the Zundel trial he was forced to admit under oath he had never witnessed any such thing and that his stories were "artistic representations".
the us government did do exactly that though. in the beginning it was alleged that all of the concentration camps were extermination camps. but the us investigated all of the camps it liberated and found that not to be the case. all of the so-called "extermination" camps it turns out, were in the soviet occupation zone, and could not be investigated by the west for many years. why send a hundred thousand french jews all the way across europe if youre just going to kill them, who knows.. it makes much more sense that after the haavara agreement and madagascar plan fell through wannsee's final solution was simply jewish resettlements in the east, where, eventually, they would serve to act as a buffer between the then-communist russia and the germans.
Except no one alleges that anyone was gassed at Dachau, at least not in appreciable numbers, so it's not surprising that was his finding. There's a difference between outsiders initially coming across a bunch of camps with corpses and half-alive people all over the place and colloquially referring to them as "death camps" and facilities purpose-made for killing people. The Cold War and Stalinization of Eastern and Central Europe did not really begin until 1947 so the Western Allies had ample to time to disprove the existence of death camps/gas chambers in Poland, and for what it's worth homicidal gas chambers were discovered by the West, such as at Mauthausen and Natzweiler-Struthof.
It makes no sense for the Nazis to have resettled Jews considering the German government banned Jewish emigration in October 1941, and the Korherr report describes a decrease in the Jewish population of Europe through a combination of natural deaths, decreases in fertility, emigration, and "special treatment" through 1942. Where did they go?
most jews fled. soviet policy prioritized evacuating jews. many ended up in random places like kazakhstan. many tried to fight, and died. which specific jews are you talking about?
The ones mentioned in the Korherr report/
you mean the delousing chamber? tell me more
It wasn't a big deal until certain agents began promoting it in schools during the 1980s, which is when the word "holocaust" first began to be used.
I don't care when it became culturally relevant. If anything that's an argument against denial since it would have made more sense to talk about it when Zionism was being debated.
Uhh my point is that no one knew what "the holocaust" was, and it was therefore not "talked about" when zionism was being debated. The extent of "the holocaust" was built up over many decades of folk tales so, when the Balfour declaration was drafted, only some vague persecution and execution of jews was considered, something few could dispute for political leverage.
Also, this idea of Americans or Soviets having some reason to oppose forming a relationship with people who could colonize the middle east for them is baseless and counter-intuitive. Americans and Soviets would have had every reason to invent the holocaust narrative.
The only way you'd get numerous eyewitnesses and accused perpetrators to confess such in court is through conspiracy/coercion.
And the U.S. and U.S.S.R. did come to blows with Israel, particularly during the Suez crisis, yet neither stated there was no genocide despite being furious with Israel and Israel being unable to then do anything about it.