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Talking about the 6 million will lead to another war

I don't get it when people say we should avoid war at all costs, and then go on to talk about how badly the Jews were treated, and then toss around that 6 million figure.

First of all, 50 million people died in WW2, we must remember everybody who suffered. There is no race or people who had it worse. If you are anti war, then you will talk of the 50 million who died. Why do we act as if the 6 million who died are somehow more important than anyone else who died? It's that sort of attitude that starts war in the first place

Secondly, that 6 million figure is debatable at best and makes you look like a zionist.

Discuss.

Reply 1

Need2Study4Exam

Oh, and by the way, the longer we keep on spewing this incorrect 6 million figure, the longer we are putting war at risk, because it is the misinformation that justifies war. We need to know the truth.

Reply 2

queen-bee

I don't know man,lots of credible holocaust conspiracy videos on YouTube,don't know what to believe anymore

Reply 3

the bear

Original post by Need2Study4Exam

There have been claims by Holocaust deniers that the gas chambers which mainstream historians believe were for the massacre of civilians never existed, but rather that the structures identified as gas chambers actually served other purposes. These other purposes include cadaver storage, delousing, and disinfection. A similar argument is sometimes used that claims gas was not used to murder Jews and other victims,and that many gas chambers were also built after the war just for show. A document advancing this theory is the Leuchter report by Fred A. Leuchter, a paper stating that only traces of cyanide were found when he examined samples taken from one of the Auschwitz gas chambers in 1988. This is often cited as evidence that gas was not used in the chambers, as no trace amounts remain. Despite the difficulty of finding traces of this material 50 years later, in February, 1990, Professor Jan Markiewicz, Director of the Institute of Forensic Research in Kraków, redid the analysis. Markiewicz and his team used microdiffusion techniques to test for cyanide in samples from the suspected gas chambers, from delousing chambers, and from control areas elsewhere within Auschwitz. The control samples tested negative, while cyanide residue was found in high concentrations in the delousing chambers, and lower concentrations in the homicidal gas chambers. This is consistent with the amounts required to kill lice and humans.

The search for cyanide in the bricks of buildings said to be gas chambers was important, because the pesticide Zyklon B would generate such a residue. This was the gas most often cited as the instrument of death for prisoners in the gas chambers, supported by both testimony and evidence collected of Nazi policy.

Another claim made by Holocaust deniers is that there were no specially-constructed vents in the gas chambers through which Zyklon B could be released. The BBC offers a response showing that this requires disregard of much documentation:

Deniers have said for years that physical evidence is lacking because they have seen no holes in the roof of the Birkenau gas chamber where the Zyklon was poured in. (In some of the gas chambers the Zyklon B was poured in through the roof, while in others it was thrown in through the windows.) The roof was dynamited at war's end, and today lies broken in pieces, but three of the four original holes were positively identified in a recent paper. Their location in the concrete matches with eyewitness testimony, aerial photos from 1944, and a ground photo from 1943. The physical evidence shows unmistakably that the Zyklon holes were cast into the concrete when the building was constructed.

The ruins of the Crematorium II gas chamber at Auschwitz-Birkenau.
Leuchter's comment that the camp was "untouched" has been dismissed as nonsense by the Holocaust scholar Robert Jan van Pelt, who explains that the absence of most of the would-be rubble from the crematoria is because the local Polish population returning to the area after the war rebuilt farmhouses to the west with bricks salvaged from rubble in the camp area including from the Birkenau crematoria. Near those crematoria is a pile of broken bricks thrown aside in the search for usable intact bricks.

Another piece of evidence Holocaust deniers frequently question is what happened to the ash after the bodies were cremated. The amount of ash produced in the cremation of a person is about a shoebox full, if done in a proper crematorium. However, eyewitness testimonies documented by Hilberg's The Destruction of the European Jews describe the burning process used in Treblinka, Sobibor, and Belzec to have carried out in multiple open-air grills where stacks of bodies were burned on top of metal bars. These grills were operated by burning piles of wood underneath. It has been questioned by Holocaust deniers[43] if it would have been possible to burn hundreds of thousands of corpses using the method as documented by Hilberg, especially when the low efficiency of such burning process, the high amounts of wood required and the often windy weather conditions of the camps are taken into account.

Cremation in the open at the Reinhard death camps (Treblinka, Sobibor and Belzec) was discussed at Nuremberg on the 7th April 1946 by Georg Konrad Morgen, SS judge and lawyer who investigated crimes committed in Nazi concentration camps. He stated: "The whole thing was like an assembly line. At the last stop they reached a big room, and were told that this was the bath. When the last one was in, the doors were shut and the gas was let into the room. As soon as death taken place in (sic), the ventilators were started. When the air was breathable, the doors were opened, and the Jewish workers removed the bodies. By means of a special process which Wirth had invented, they were burned in the open air without the use of fuel."

Aerial photographs of Auschwitz indicate that what appears to be ash produced in Auschwitz was piled into the nearby river and marsh, and there is well-documented evidence that other ash was used as fertilizer in nearby fields. Photographs of Treblinka taken by the camp commandant show what looks to be ash piles being distributed by steam shovels.

Another argument used by Holocaust deniers is that testimony on the gas chambers is unreliable. The Institute for Historical Review is one of the organizations which make this assertion. In the words of the IHR:

"Hoss [Hoess] said in his confession that his men would smoke cigarettes as they pulled the dead Jews out of the gas chambers ten minutes after gassing. Isn't Zyklon-B explosive? Highly so. The Hoss confession is obviously false."

The Nizkor Project and other sources have pointed out that the minimal concentration of Zyklon-B to be explosive is 56,000 parts per million, while the amount used to kill a human is 300 parts per million, as is evidenced in "The Merck Index" and the "CRC Handbook of Chemistry and Physics". In fact, the Nazis' own documentation stated "Danger of explosion: 75 grams of HCN in 1 cubic meter of air. Normal application approx. 8–10 grams per cubic meter, therefore not explosive." (Nuremberg document NI-9912)

The Institute for Historical Review publicly offered a reward of $50,000 for verifiable "proof that gas chambers for the purpose of killing human beings existed at or in Auschwitz." Mel Mermelstein, a survivor of Auschwitz, submitted his own testimony as proof but it was ignored. He then sued IHR in the United States and the case was subsequently settled for $50,000, plus $40,000 in damages for personal suffering. The court declared the statement that "Jews were gassed to death at the Auschwitz Concentration Camp in Poland during the summer of 1944" was a fact.

Reply 4

Mathemusician

I think that most people treat the war and the holocaust as separate but linked disasters. A major difference is that in war, both sides are trying to kill each other, but in the concentration camps it wasn't a fight, it was systematic extermination.

I do agree that it isn't always right when the 6 million are mentioned, but mostly because it doesn't include the 5 million from other ethnic groups (mostly Roma), homosexuals, and disabled people who were also systematically murdered.

Reply 5

Need2Study4Exam

The fact of the matter is, a certain group of people are benefiting from the war today by using the holocaust.

Reply 6

MrWhite2008-2013

Original post by Need2Study4Exam

The Holocaust was one of the best-documented events in history. It is incorrect that the lives lost during it are 'more valued' than the lives of the soldiers and civilians. It gains special attention because it was the result of meticulously-organised racial hatred, as opposed to combat and/or bombings, and therefore contains its own lessons that are just as relevant today as they were 70 years ago when Europe was finally liberated from the Nazi filth. At the Wannsee Conference of 1941 a meeting took place between Hitler and various high-ranking Nazi officials, and the sole purpose of the meeting was the organisation of the total elimination of the Jewish people. Pseudo-historians like David Irving argue about the lack of evidence, yet as the Soviets and the Western Allies were advancing ever closer to Berlin, Himmler ordered the destruction of any proof that the genocide had taken place in an attempt to save his own skin. People who doubt/deny the Holocaust tend to be Nazi sympathisers who attempt to outline Hitler's 'good' qualities. Also, we constantly remember the citizens and soldiers who died during the war, we even have a day dedicated to them.