This morning I opened my front door to find a flier lying on the porch. I thought it was another local contractor ad or announcement of a barbecue-and-rummage sale, so I scooped it up to glance at it before dropping it in the recycle hopper. Instead, I find in my hand a vile piece of unconscionable poison. And it seemed like it would be such a nice day!
I’m not going to dignify this crap by citing the source. The header of the two-side sheet reads: The Holocaust Controversy The Case For Open Debate. What follows is a putrid example of revisionist nonsense designed to suggest that six million Jews were not systematically slaughtered by the Third Reich. In tone, it is reasonable. It does not make many strident claims with exclamation points, just calmly asserts one bullshit “fact” after another (plus a photograph of an open pit containing the skeletonized remains of concentration camp victims labeling it a photo of typhus victims) to lay the groundwork for the claim that the Holocaust didn’t happen, that it is all a Big Lie assembled by a Zionist conspiracy to advance the cause of sympathy for stateless Jews in order to get them a state.
I will cite one piece of twisty nonsense from the flier. In one paragraph, the calim is made that in 1990 the Auschwitz State Museum revised the old claim of four million murdered down to one million. It then goes on with a list of (uncited) claims of further numeric reductions, not by the Auschwitz Museum, but by “a French scholar” and “another mainstream Holocaust scholar” all the way down to half a million. The wording is slippery. I advise you to go to the link provided, which is directly to the museum, and read the detailed history. The paragraph I mention in the flier leaves off with the suggestion that only a half million people were “actually” killed in total.
The Nazis murdered eleven million people, systematically, with calculation. Nearly six million were Jews (the number vary above and below by a few tens of thousands, but they come from testimony given at Nuremberg, from eye-witness accounts, estimates of populations before and after the war, and many other methods of tabulations, not through “best guesses,” which is what the sheet of propaganda left on my porch would have one believe), but there were five million others—gypies, homosexuals, slavs of various nationalities, and political undesirables such as communists, socialists, social democrats, as well as Jehovah’s Witnesses, and people accused of being “asocial” or of “socially deviant type.”
This is not disputed by any credible authority.
Nor is Hitler’s obsession with the Jews, nor is the history of virulent antisemitism in Europe, nor are the claims made by various members of the Nazi regime, nor is the physical evidence of the camps.
Over a million Jews were murdered at Auschwitz. It was a large camp and has become the symbol for all the others. But bear one fact in mind before you quibble over numbers or intent: the Nazis built 20,000 of these camps.
Not all have ovens, not all had gas chambers, but all of them were forced labor camps and all of them were in the business of killing the inmates. Conservatively, all you would need is a hundred deaths per camp to bring it up to two million. Five hundred per camp and you get ten million.
People were worked endlessly, underfed, disease ran rampant, mass graves were common. We have seen this kind of barbarism in our recent history, in Cambodia, Rwanda, the former Yugoslavia. And yes, Stalin killed millions more.
The offensiveness of this shit is profound. Yet here is this scrap of paper suggesting that, like the nonsense over evolution, we should “teach the controversy.”
Fine. Here is the controversy I would teach. The controversy of denial, that people would try so hard to say this never happened or, as is more likely of late, that it wasn’t “as bad” as has been stated. The controversy that continually puts Jews under the spotlight, which is the same germinal thinking that resulted in this horrific bit of substantiated history.
I’ve had lengthy conversations with people who believe this. The hallmark of them is that they managed never to directly address any evidence put before them. Direct them to the Nuremberg transcripts, they say something about not having found “those” records. Direct them to eyewitness testimony, they haven’t had a chance to validate it. The snake-slithers of obfuscation and refusal to confront is incredible to behold, but the question that boggles my mind is this:
To what end do you wish to exonerate Hitler and the Third Reich?
Is it that you can’t imagine Europeans doing this? Look what we did to the Indians. Is it that you simply cannot bring yourselves to believe the word of anyone not a Christian? Look at the lies spread in the name of Christ, up to and including the abuse of children by priest (and the fact that in Rwanda there were Catholic priests leading the charge in some areas to slaughter). Is it that you can’t believe people could be that evil for no reason? I can see that as a problem, because if they could do something like that, then so could you.
Here’s the ugly truth—circumstances permitting, most people can be that evil. Just look at Rwanda. That was over religion, birth rates, and water tables. Cambodia was over ideology.
Oh, but those weren’t white people? Europeanized, educated, civilized whites? How could the home of Kant and Beethoven, Goethe and Mann harbor such vileness?
That’s the controversy. The fragility of the thin veneer of civilization that keeps us “above it all.” How easily is it stripped, broken, thrown away if we feel threatened. (We just extended the Patriot Act another four years, a rather blatant violation of Constitutional liberties, and all just so we’ll feel “safe.”)
I shouldn’t have been surprised. There are Nazis in my neighborhood. But it does shock me, every time I find it. Turn over a rock you always thought was harmless and even pretty and there are the maggots of the soul…
Holocaust Revisionism is evil. It may be on par with the Holocaust itself. “Oh, don’t pay attention to the screams behind that curtain—it’s not what you think. Besides, isn’t it a fine curtain? Do you really think the people capable of creating such a lovely curtain could be monsters?”
Got one word for you: Wagner.
Mark,
Truth is the first casualty of war and the official history is written by the winners of wars.
In the preface to "The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich" Will Shirer emphasized the importance of recording history as it happened. The more time that passes from the actual historical events, the more distorted the history that is recorded becomes.
The estimated number of Jews executed by the Nazis is around 6 million. Jews were not the only victims, however, as the list included Gypsies, Jehovah’s Witnesses, disabled citizens, and many more. Even though the Germans kept records of the people they imprisoned and killed, many of the records were lost or destroyed in the final days of the war, and many records that survived are held inaccessible to scholars by the German government.
The total number of people executed in the holocaust is unknown, but estimated at around 11 million. This is an important distinction as the holocaust is depicted as only including Jewish people in the US media as a means of promoting pro Israeli bias among American Christians.
Why is this important today?
Wars are waged for economic reasons, but they are fought for ideological reasons.
How many Americans would support a foreign war to secure the profits of Exxon? Probably far fewer that would support a war to free peolpe from a perceived oppressor.
How many Americans would support a war to support oppressive regimes that exploited workers to provide us with cheap manufactured goods? Not near as many as would support a war against a communist threat.
How many American would support death by starvation imposed by Israel on the men women and children of Gaza so Israel can annex Gaza and lay claim to its massive natural gas reserves?
The importance of history is that, if accurate, it can reveal the errors of our past. But for this to work, the historical record must be as accurate as possible. Sometimes it may not fit the popular image promoted for the political and economic gain of a few people, and that is where the lessons of history matters most.
HIDDEN FACTS REVISIONISTS DON'T WANT YOU TO KNOW ABOUT THE JEHOVAH'S WITNESSES AND THE JEWS, NAZIS, HOLOCAUST, AND WW2.
In the late 1960s, the WatchTower Society commissioned an exact and comprehensive history of Jehovah's Witnesses in Germany, which was to include exact and precise statistics for the Holocaust period, which were to be extracted from not only government archives, but, more importantly, from the WatchTower Cult's own METICULOUS RECORDS in Germany and other European countries. That report was published by the WatchTower Cult in 1973.
Apparently, the WatchTower Cult was greatly disappointed in the Holocaust statistics uncovered by its own legal researchers, because that report has rarely been cited by the WatchTower Cult in its' own Holocaust-related articles published subsequent to the 1973 report. Instead of using its' own documented exact statistics, both the WatchTower Cult and individual Jehovah's Witnesses routinely cite inflated statistics from non-WatchTower sources whose numbers are inflated "guestimates", or are inflated numbers from unreliable and inaccurate records.
Accordingly to the WatchTower Cult's own 1973 report, only 6019 Jehovah's Witnesses were arrested in Germany during the 12 year Nazi period of 1933 through 1945. Only 2000 German JWs were ever sent to concentration camps. Only 203 were executed. Another 432 German JWs died while in custody in all German jails, prisons, and camps.
Exact numbers for other Nazi-occupied countries are unknown. Even Holocaust experts who inflate German JW statistics guestimate that only
600-800 non-German JWs from Nazi-occupied countries were ever sent to concentration camps. Mortality figures are not known.
Thus, only 2600-2800 Jehovah's Witnesses were ever sent to Nazi concentration camps. Death statistics are not known, but can be reasonably estimated to be in the 500-700 range. The JW TOTAL for 1933-1945 is about HALF the DAILY AVERAGE of Jewish deaths — 1370 every single day for the 12 year Nazi period.
During this same 1933-1945 time period, there were more Jehovah's Witnesses arrested and jailed in the United States than in Germany. In fact, just during 1941-1945, approximately 4500 American Jehovah's Witnesses men "elected" to go to prison rather than serve in the U.S. Military and help stop Nazis atrocities against their fellow JWs.
Approximately 3000 of those 4500 American JWs were even offered "conscientious objector" status, in which they were offered "non-combatant" work as a substitute for military service, but 99% of those 3000 American JWs refused to help out even that much.
It is an insult to memorialize the small handful of anti-societal, trouble-seeking Jehovah's Witnesses alongside the 6,000,000+ Jewish Holocaust victims given that Jehovah's Witnesses view the Jewish people much as did the Nazis.
The WatchTower Cult preaches its own version of "replacement theology", which teaches that YHWH rejected the Jews as His "chosen people", and
replaced the Jewish people with today's "Jehovah's Witnesses". The WatchTower Cult teaches that modern-day Jews are YHWH's enemies, and that all of the YHWH's promises of restoration for the Jewish people now belong to the followers of the WatchTower Cult.
In fact, the title "Jehovah's Witnesses" was originally applied to the Jewish people by the Prophet Isaiah, and that scripture is even memorialized on the wall inside the front entrance of the Holocaust Museum in Washington D.C.
The WatchTower Cult, in calling its own members — "Jehovah's Witnesses" — is attempting to steal that designation away from the Jewish people. This is the very reason that for the past three decades that the WatchTower Cult has had a corporate department dedicated to making certain that every single Holocaust rememberance of any size or type — newspaper article, book, speech, museum, etc — anywhere in the world, publicize the fact that the WatchTower Cult's own "Jehovah's Witnesses" were equally persecuted alongside "natural" Jews. This is the WatchTower Cult's way of claiming that "Satan" and his human supporters hate "Jehovah's Witnesses" as much or more than they hate natural Jews — thus attempting to prevent the Jewish people from laying claim to any spiritual significance that might be interpreted from the Holocaust experience.
In 1933, after the Nazis first started arresting some German JWs, the WatchTower Cult issued a public proclamation of appeasement which condemned an imagined partnership between "Jewish Big Business" and the governments of the United States and Great Britain, which supposedly oppressed and exploited other countries, including Germany. The WatchTower Cult's proclamation condemned the Americans and the British as "the most oppressive empire on earth".
A conciliatory letter also was sent to Hitler, which highlighted those areas in which the WatchTower Cult supported the new Nazi government. The letter even claimed that the U.S. Government had imprisoned the leaders of the WatchTower Cult during WW1 because they refused to print anti-German propaganda.
During the early years of World War 2, when Germany and Japan were having much success on the battlefields, the WatchTower Cult started teaching that the Bible prophesied that the Axis Powers would defeat and rule over the United States, Britain, and other Allies.
In the United States, JWs went to the homes of families of American service men and women and told those parents, siblings, and spouses that Germany was prophesied to win the war, and that in fighting against Hitler, American and British soldiers were fighting against God's will. A Jehovah's Witness named Taylor was arrested after going to two homes of dead servicemen and telling their families that their sons had died while opposing God's will. Don't believe this? Read 1943 U.S. Supreme Court case TAYLOR v. MISSISSIPPI. Remember the actual historical context the next time you read some liberal newspaper or book's account about how some poor innocent Jehovah's Witness was beaten during WW2 for doing nothing except preaching the Bible door-to-door.
While it is true that a small number of German and other European JWs suffered greatly during the early stages of the Holocaust, it is also true that during the latter stages of the Holocaust that imprisoned JWs became exemplary Nazi collaborators highly valued by the Nazis.
Over the decades, the WatchTower Cult itself has published numerous biographical stories in which imprisoned JWs are praised for having been given positions of authority and responsibility within the various Nazi concentration camps. Various Nazi officials are quoted praising those JWs for not only their work, but their work ethic and supportive attitudes.
In fact, one of Heinrich Himmler's deputies even sent Himmler a report suggesting that after Germany won the war that conquered non-Germanic christian countries be forced to convert to the Jehovah's Witness religion, so as to maintain a controlling religious element in those people's lives which would pose no threat to Nazi political control.