Holocaust deniers and the time it took to kill Jews

[Nickdfresh]

..
The 6 million figure was accepted across the board back when Auschwitz had a big sign with 4 million on it i.e. 4 there +2 elsewhere =6 . If you are not old enough to have lived before 1990 , that is how it was.

Now since it is know that less than 1 million died at the Big A . That 4 is now 1, but it ain't.
Yet they did take down the sign , that is truth

The "sign" has been debunked over an over. No one based death calculations on a fucking sign. They based them on knowledgeable estimates and in many cases the Nazis own records. This has been stated over and over yet neonazis keep stating the same fucking rubbish as if it were fact if stated often enough...

So:

1 there +2 elsewhere = 3 ( or at best 4 using fractions), not 6.

That is not "denial", just simple math. Or do you wish to argue that all Holocaust history and MSM WWII programs back before 1990 were all works of "Denial" noting that 4 million figure at Auschwitz as accurate to derive the 6. And It was continuously implied the "4" was almost all Jews. I remember the TV shows and I have more than a few books from1960-1990 all stated the same thing. There are photos of those changing Auschwitz signs as well , if you never saw them in person.

I'll leave this at that. The battle between "believers" and "deniers" is pretty much "rubbish" as neither side uses real math since the sign came down, so establishing time constraints is meaningless as well. How can you, If the figures are incorrect to begin with?

No. The "believers" do use real math and often actual death certificates...

[Nickdfresh]

...
the fact is that the USSR had a vested interest in presenting its liberation of Auschwitz as a liberation of mankind as part of the great war against fascism, not just for the benefit of the Jews. So at no point was that 4 million event touted by the Communists as being 4 million Jews--that would have been completely contrary to the point of the exaggeration in the first place.

..."

Actually quite the opposite is true. There was an active Soviet campaign to minimize the Holocaust lest it detract away from the suffering and mass deaths of the Soviet populace and Stalin initially wanted no special class of victims...

[michael mills]

Actually quite the opposite is true. There was an active Soviet campaign to minimize the Holocaust lest it detract away from the suffering and mass deaths of the Soviet populace and Stalin initially wanted no special class of victims...

I remember a story from the 1970s that may well be apocryphal but is nevertheless instructive.

A US politician is in the Soviet Union on an official mission. At a meeting with Soviet officials, he asks one of them why the Soviet Government conceals the fact that Soviet Jews were specifically targeted by the German occupiers during the Second World War.

The Soviet official answers: "We do not want to arouse inappropriate sympathies among the Soviet people".

The US politician is outraged. "What is wrong with having sympathies for the murdered Jews?" he fumes.

The Soviet official answers: "Not sympathies for the Jews. Sympathies for the Nazis".

[wm]

Although the problem with this is that the Great Soviet Encyclopedia, the third edition (1969-1978) says:

In the capitalist countries anti-Semitism still exists. Its most extreme expression was found in Nazi Germany. The Nazis implemented a policy of mass extermination of the Jews (during the WW2, 1939-1945, 6 million people were wiped out).

so really it's not quite true they denied the Jews, Soviet or not, were specifically targeted by the German occupiers.

[David Thompson]

Nickdfresh -- Please avoid low forms of speech when posting. If you make this mistake again, your offending posts will be removed.

2. Low forms of speech

We have intelligent readers here, so low forms of speech are unwelcome. We're trying to move past the lavatory wall stage in discussing historical problems. Noncomplying posts are subject to deletion after warning, and in extreme cases, to deletion with no warning at all.

http://forum.axishistory.com/app.php/rules

[Nickdfresh]

Nickdfresh -- Please avoid low forms of speech when posting. If you make this mistake again, your offending posts will be removed.

2. Low forms of speech

We have intelligent readers here, so low forms of speech are unwelcome. We're trying to move past the lavatory wall stage in discussing historical problems. Noncomplying posts are subject to deletion after warning, and in extreme cases, to deletion with no warning at all.

http://forum.axishistory.com/app.php/rules

Lima Charlie...

I will comply sir from here on out...

[wm]

As to the subtracting, before the war (and most likely during the war) there were more births than deaths so really there is no need to subtract natural deaths, if we don't include natural births. As we know, the wartime-born Jewish children were murdered too, all of them.

As to unnatural dying, there was no reason for anybody to die from unnatural courses. The idea that in the thirties/forties war meant famine, pestilence and death is simply false - especially in the mostly rural Eastern Europe.

People in Poland, especially in the rural areas had their own stockpiles of food for (most of the peasants were self sufficient and didn't buy food) sufficient to survive at least winter. For them the 1939 few-weeks-long war wasn't a problem at all, especially that the next year harvest was good, and there were a couple of bumper harvests in the following years.
So the food situation in Poland and generally in Eastern Europe should have been excellent. It wasn't because every year the Germans confiscated most of the food leaving very little for the occupied territories, and even less for the Jews in the ghettos.
This, according to the Hague Conventions, was a war crime. The Conventions not only forbade exploitation of the occupied territories and confiscation of private property, they actually demanded the population was treated with respect.
So we rather shouldn't say that:

In other words, technically correct, but not likely to engender much sympathy.

Germany was responsible for all non-natural deaths, not because it feels right - but because the laws said so.

And WM, I say with utmost honesty that I respect your unerring ability to always get in the last word in an argument before David cuts us off--a sincere Merry Christmas to you.

It's mostly a favorable time zones alignment...
Happy New Year to you

[michael mills]

The economic situation of Polish Jewry was precarious even before the German conquest. By the late 1930s about one-third of Polish Jews, ie around one million persons, had become so impoverished that it was entirely dependent for its subsistence on financial support from the Jewish communities in the United States and other Western countries. That statistic was a revealed in a study tour to Poland made by the British socialist Harold Laski.

That impoverishment was partially a result of the Great Depression, which hit the whole Polish population very hard, but was greatly exacerbated by Polish anti-Jewish measures, both official and unofficial. The most serious unofficial measure was the economic boycott of Jewish traders that had been begun by the National Democratic Party in 1910 and sustained continuously since that time. The aim of the National Democrats was to force the Jews to emigrate by making it too hard for them to earn a livelihood in Poland, and since the overwhelming majority if Polish Jews were petty traders or artisans who did not produce their own food and relied on selling their services to the peasants, they were very vulnerable to boycott.

The main official measure that impoverished a large part of the Jewish population was the system of peasant cooperatives created by the Polish Government for the purpose of improving the economic status of the peasants by "eliminating the middle man" and enabling them to market their produce directly to consumers. That measure was not overtly anti-Jewish, being aimed against all middlemen, but since the great majority if the traders interposed between the peasants and the urban population were Jewish, its effect was to contribute to impoverishment specifically of a large part of the Jewish population.

Furthermore, after the death of Pilsudski the Sanacja regime became more anti-Jewish, and gave more radically anti-Jewish elements such as the National Democrats more or less free reign to continue their various boycotts and other discriminatory actions aimed against the Jews.

Thus, when Poland was conquered by Germany, the Jewish population was already extremely vulnerable to the greatly intensified measures against them introduced by the new German rulers. Even so, the German occupiers did not immediately take steps to deprive the Jews of food, and indeed were quite happy to allow charitable organisations in the United States to continue to send food aid to the Polish population, of which some 7% was reserved for the Jews, obviously because it relieved them of some of the burden of feeding occupied Poland.

The food situation really became critical when the United States entered the war and all food aid from American charities was cut off. It needs to be borne in mind that German-dominated Europe could supply only 90% of its food requirements, and since food imports were cut off by the British blockade, it was inevitable that eventually some part of the population would starve. The German Government reacted to the critical food shortage by discriminatory distribution measures, reserving the available food for the German and other favoured populations such as the Danes and Czechs, with the result that the less-favoured populations received only what was left over.

Even so, it is incorrect to think of the entire population of closed ghettos such as that of Warsaw as slowly dying of starvation prior to 1942. A minority of the ghetto population was badly hit by starvation, but that was primarily due to maldistribution within the ghettos themselves rather than to an aggregate food deficiency; the orphans and other poor starved, while the better-off continued to eat at restaurants.

The decision of the Generalgouvernement authorities to continue feeding only the 300,000 Jews who were working for German industries (and indeed to increase their rations), and to cut off all food to the remaining 1.2 million, came in August 1942, as a reaction to an acute food crisis. Governor-General Frank openly admitted that with that decision he had sentenced 1.2 million persons to death. The initiation and acceleration of mass-killing with poison gas at extermination camps was in many ways a more hygienic alternative to simply allowing the Jews penned up in the ghettos to slowly starve to death, since that would have led to the outbreak of epidemics that could spread to the rest of the population.

[GregSingh]

The most serious unofficial measure was the economic boycott of Jewish traders

What is the evidence that this "measure" was successful in any way or that it caused impoverishment of Jewish population in Poland?

In Germany an access to Jewish shops was denied and physical force against customers used; in Poland price and/or quality of produce/service won at the end, regardless of occasional shouting outside. That was the difference.

I spent some time studying Jewish business press from pre-war Poland for other research and can't recall that this "measure" was a major concern or a hindrance to Jewish businesses. In Eastern Poland percent of Jewish population was quite large and these were the poorest ones.
How any boycott of Jewish businesses in the town with 70% of Jews was even possible?

[wm]

The story of the successful economic boycott is just a myth.
Primary sources like the Ringelblum Archive (which is a huge collection of eyewitness accounts from locations all over Poland) say actually the opposite. That even in Western Poland, the lair of the "evil one", i.e. National Democracy the boycott was short lived, and quickly ran out of steam.
There were successful boycotts, for example in the infamous Przytyk where a few local nouveau riche small businessmen were able to dislodge Jewish traders using criminal methods, but generally it wasn't a huge problem.
And they mention (which can be found in the Polish sources too) the Polish peasant like obstinacy (well, a large part of the population were peasants) in their buying habits, and the almost intransigent preference for the "cheating" but habitually familiar from time immemorial Jewish shops.

That the Jewish population wasn't already extremely vulnerable (because of poverty) shows the fact that even small Jewish ghettos were able to pay large, repeated contributions imposed by the Germans (or rather local German commanders/bureaucrats - who most likely embezzled most of the money anyway) reaching tens of millions of today's dollars.

The peasant cooperatives were mostly organized by grass root efforts, many of them bit the dust eventually or struggled to survive - socialists ideas (like cooperatives) rarely work in real life, see kibbutzim for more examples of this...

[michael mills]

The story of the successful economic boycott is just a myth.

A lot of Jewish historians seem to believe it.

The histories of Polish Jewry that I have read all seem to agree that the majority of Polish Jews were very poor (although not necessarily poorer than the average Pole), and that a large proportion of them, about one third, were dependent on relief from abroad.

They also seem to agree that the situation of Polish Jews became much worse during the 1930s.

That is not negated by the fact that there were wealthy Jewish businessmen who paid a large proportion of the taxes collected by the Polish state. Wealthy urban middle-class Jews were prominent, but were not typical of the Jews of Poland.

[wm]

Unemployment among the peasants was estimated to be up 50%, they were cities with 70% unemployment. It was estimated that Poland (or rather her lands) was 18 percent poorer in 1939 than just before the Great War started (at the beginning of the thirties it was of course even worse) but those historians knew it was because of the boycott. Well, ok - but I wonder what support they have for their theory.

I don't quite understand the status of "depended". In Poland prices of agricultural products were hugely depressed, food was cheap and plentiful, many people were surviving on $1 per month (although it wasn't fun at all), even more people were entirely self-sufficient and didn't buy anything (except maybe salt), millions of Poles were able to survive without relief - so why couldn't Jews?
It would interesting to see where the money went, for what were used.

Or the relief was like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kLIixEuiwx4
btw, Jews and cooperatives: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6q1G8taGkWU

I'm rather certain that even those "depended" Jews were veritable Rockefellers in comparison with East European serfs just a hundred years earlier, or the contemporary Soviet serfs in Kolkhozes/Sovkhozes.

[David Thompson]

Let's get back on topic -- the calculations of deniers as to the time it took to kill Jews.

[Sergey Romanov]

I don't know how you get such "rubbish", but here is an easier "denier" :roll: calculation.

The 6 million figure was accepted across the board back when Auschwitz had a big sign with 4 million on it i.e. 4 there +2 elsewhere =6 . If you are not old enough to have lived before 1990 , that is how it was.

What a perfect example of denier ignorance mixed with arrogance mixed with stupidity.

The big sign in Auschwitz never said those 4 million were Jews.

4,000,000

Source: Cited by a Soviet document of May 6, 1945 and officially acknowledged by the Nuremberg War Crimes trial. This figure was also reported in The New York Times on April 18, 1945, although 50 years later on January 26, 1995, The New York Times and The Washington Post slashed the figure to 1,500,000 citing new findings by the Auschwitz Museum officials. In fact, the figure of 4,000,000 was later repudiated by the Auschwitz museum officials in 1990 but the figure of 1,500,000 victims was not formally announced by Polish President Lech Walesa until five years after the Auschwitz historians had first announced their discovery.

http://www.rense.com/general69/dim.htm

Denier? So when did you stop beating your wife? LOL

Of course denier. No normal person would think of using this kind of an "argument" which basically amounts to a lie, only deniers. This "math" is a very old denier meme.

I simply do not care what the figure was

Sure, that's why you wrote:

"The 6 million figure was accepted across the board back when Auschwitz had a big sign with 4 million on it i.e. 4 there +2 elsewhere =6 ."

Right. You (for all intents and purposes) lied about the figure you don't care about. Sounds fine!

, as long as the figure is accurate/valid. So don't go labelling me or putting me on one side or the other of this bogus fence of "Deniers" or "believers". Might as well be arguing about the existence of
the Big G, AFAIAC.

Except you're not any kind of a fence-sitter. Fence-sitters, however daft they may be, at least don't repeat the primitive, stale denier memes like this "4 million" thing.

As to

The big sign in Auschwitz never said those 4 million were Jews

The second derivation of the sign with 1.5 million said "mainly jews",

Trying to move the goal posts. We were not talking about the second sign.

and I don't what they imply in Russia , but here in the "West" it has always been implied "mainly Jews" back when the sign was 4 million.

Trying to move the goal posts. The sign itself doesn't imply anything.

What the historians in the West implied about the Auschwitz percentages on the other hand, can only be coupled with what the historians in the West thought about the death toll, not with what was written on some silly plaque. And what the historians in the West thought about the death toll can be easily surveyed, to wit:

http://www.nizkor.org/features/denial-o ... -2-01.html

IIRC, you could watch the "World at War" series to get a typical feel for how Auschwitz and the Holocaust was portrayed over here in the West, pre-1990. 4 million gassed, 2 million killed elsewhere.

Thank you for making my point: "4 million gassed" implies less than 4 million in Auschwitz, because of the other large gassing camps. Way to refute yourself.

[Sergey Romanov]

in fact anti-Semitism was a criminal offence punishable by death

LOL. You make up your own "facts" so easily.