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No Jews were killed in any gas chambers that had been disguised as shower rooms. They didn't exist. It was one of two salacious rumors about shower rooms. One of those rumors was that the bars of soap given to the inmates were manufactured from the fat of murdered Jews. And the other rumor was that some of these shower rooms were fake shower rooms that were actually gas chambers in disguise.
Both of those rumors survived in the public consciousness long after the end of the war. In some cases bars of soap were given Jewish burial rites by some Synagogues. But now it is admitted that claim was never true. The other salacious shower-room rumor is still claimed to have been true.
The claims made by Holocaust Revisionists are:
The first point has essentially been conceded by the mainstream. Given that no such order has never been found, the prevailing theory focuses on "gradual radicalization" and mind-reading of lower-level officers "reading between the lines" and inferring what they were supposed to do without any written orders by their superiors. Yes it's as ridiculous as it sounds but given the lack of documentary evidence that's what they are stuck with. The reality is that there is no single historical consensus on that point because Revisionists are correct and they are wrong.
The mainstream is extremely defensive of the Gas Chamber story- if they conceded that the entire Holocaust narrative would unravel at the seams. But Revisionists have nonetheless proven their case at Majdanek and forced the mainstream to Revise the status of 5 out of 7 of the originally claimed "gas chambers disguised as shower rooms." So there's precedent for Revisionists making the falsifiable claim - "Hey you said this was a secret gas chamber used to kill Jews for decades but it was no such thing" and they were proven right.
The question of how many Jews died in WWII is a highly open question. Even mainstream historians like Gerald Reitlinger have put the figure as low as 4.2 million. Raul Hilberg himself put the figure at 5.1 million, well short of the vaunted "6 million." Revisionists vary significantly as well, estimates range from probably 300,000 to 2.5 million.
The Revisionist case hinges most notably on actually falsifiable claims at specific camps, such as the Revisionist claim it is false that 800,000 Jews were murdered, buried, unburied, cremated, and reburied at Treblinka. The mainstream could forever disprove Revisionism in the course of 48 hours if they wanted to by excavating these alleged mass graves, the location of which are precisely known. But excavation is strictly forbidden, echoing the exact same arguments currently being employed by the Tribe rejecting calls for excavation of the alleged Children's mass grave at the Kamloops Indian school. Not a single mass grave of the alleged 800,000 victims has been excavated on that site.
How many Jews do you think died in WWII? Of those, how many were murdered by axis powers?
I would estimate the higher range of Revisionist estimates, around 2 million. This wouldn't entail any Jews who may have died under Stalin during or after the war. None of those 2 million were murdered inside homicidal gas chambers disguised as shower rooms. They died mostly of disease like epidemic typhus, especially near the end of the war when the German infrastructure was collapsing from being bombed on all sides. The catastrophic wartime conditions led to a very high death toll in the concentration camps near the end of the war, and those images of the catastrophic conditions are those used most frequently to "sell" the idea to i.e. young students that the Germans had an official, secret policy to gas all the jews inside shower rooms.
Keep in mind that according to the official historical position there were no Jews killed by Stalin. Every single Jew who died in WWII, even if they were a partisan or part of the Red Army, or died under the custody of Stalin during or after the war, all are counted as Holocaust victims. It is not known how many Jews, especially those masses who were deported or evacuated deeper into the Soviet Union ahead of the German advance, died.
When it comes to more specific claims- such as concrete claims regarding the number of Jews killed in a certain time in a certain place, Auschwitz for example, the Revisionist position aligns with the prima facie camp records and top-secret decodes. It may surprise you to know that Britain had intercepted and decoded top-secret communications from Auschwitz to SS Command, including during the height of the Holocaust. Those intercepted decodes pertaining to top-secret communication contained detailed statistics regarding the number of prisoner arrivals, departures, and deaths and contained no reference whatsoever to any alleged extermination operation of millions of people.
The communications do show urgency regarding a high death toll caused by epidemic typhus, with SS command ordering the death toll to be reduced in order to maintain a productive workforce which was crucial for the war effort. The mainstream has no explanation whatsoever why these decodes would elide any reference, even in "innuendo form", to the ongoing alleged extermination program.
The concern over a high death rate caused by typhus led to the increased deliveries and consumption of Zyklon B which, according to camp records, were successful in reducing the rate of registered deaths. Zyklon B was important for delousing clothing and furniture to prevent the spread of Typhus. Of course the official narrative is that the insecticide Zyklon B was the murder weapon used to murder over a million Jews inside gas chambers that had been disguised as shower rooms.
This is to say, when it comes to specific questions over the numbers of deaths in a place like Auschwitz or Majdanek, the Revisionist position is based on official camp records which registered the number and cause of death of inmates, whereas the mainstream claims that the extermination operation was top-secret and so the people murdered were not registered at the camp and their deaths were never recorded, and they were all cremated so their remains can never be recovered... so they don't exist in camp records and the remains don't exist in any known location...
Essentially the Revisionist position says the camp records and top-secret decodes are accurate statistics of inmate deaths, and the mainstream position says that the camp records are not accurate because they do not include the million unregistered inmates secretly murdered inside gas chambers disguised as shower rooms.
From the Auschwitz Museum:
The mainstream position is that the inmates did not exist in camp records, and their deaths did not exist in camp records, and the murder operation that killed them did not exist in camp records, and the murder operation was not referenced at all whatsoever in top-secret decodes, and the remains of those undocumented million inmates secretly killed inside gas chambers disguised as shower rooms with Zyklon B are nowhere to be found.... the Revisionists say that these records are reliable.
Ok, do you deny that axis forces carried out massacres of Jews and other ethnic undesirables?
Of course not, I laid out the claims quite clearly that are being contested. Reprisals clearly qualify as "massacres" and they were utilized in response to partisan warfare. Although the practice of reprisals against civilians was legal at the time it still constitutes a massacre. I wouldn't qualify inmates in a concentration camp dying of Typhus as a massacre. I also don't think concentrating a Jew in a camp to conduct labor is particularly more evil than conscripting a German, giving him a rifle, and forcing him to march on Stalingrad and being shot as a deserter if he doesn't comply.
Really the sacredness of the Holocaust comes to those three claims I clearly contested in my earlier post, what you are doing seems like a Motte and Bailey. We've gone from claims of top-secret plans to exterminate world Jewry in gas chambers disguised as shower rooms, but you are asking me "do you deny massacres happened?" No I don't, neither do Revisionists.
So to be clear here, there were zero Jewish extermination camps? The Nazis did not purposely commit a genocide at all against Jews? They just died because of poor conditions in the war/camps? And why were the Jews in concentration camps to begin with then? Don't write a million paragraphs. Just give me straight answers.
There were zero extermination camps. There were concentration and labor camps and transit camps.
ALL of the alleged "Extermination Camps" were located in areas conquered by the Soviet Union.
In 1945 Allied propaganda claimed that all the concentration camps, particularly those in Germany itself were "death camps". The camps that initially figured most prominently were those in Germany such as Dachau, Belsen, Buchenwald, Sachsenhausen... I'm sure most of us were shown horrific footage as children of the liberation of these camps, and it would have been those camps which had been liberated by the Western Allies.
But observers among the British and American occupation forces in Germany, while admitting that many inmates had died of disease and starvation in the last months of the war, had found no evidence at all of "gas chambers". So the eastern camps in the Russian zone of occupation like Auschwitz and Treblinka became the most prominent "Extermination camps" although Western observers were denied access to investigate those camps. All of the footage you would have been shown as a child are now acknowledged to have been concentration camps and not extermination camps.
Essentially, the "gas chamber" claim was alleged at the Western Camps but then disproven in every single camp the Western Allies investigated. Only in the camps where the Western Allies were denied access to investigate are those camps still alleged to have been "extermination camps."
Jews were concentrated into camps for the same reasons the Japanese were concentrated into camps in the United States.
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