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Nope. I remember going to a Holocaust museum at primary school and that never came up. This is the first I've ever heard of anything involving lampshades either. The focus was much more on the history of intolerance, hostility, and repression that led up to the Nazis deciding to just kill all the Jews. The gruesome details of how they were killed at the camps were not gone into, I would guess partly because it's not child-appropriate and partly because it's not actually a useful thing to know in terms of what they were trying to teach us.
I don't have much experience talking to Holocaust deniers outside of the Motte, since, well, this is the only place I've ever met any, but one of the things that surprises me about them is their obsession with quibbling what seem to me like trifling details. I don't particularly care about the exact methods by which the Nazis murdered millions of Jews. I care that they murdered millions of Jews. That's the morally significant part.
Insofar as I find other questions about the Holocaust historically or philosophically interesting, I think for me it's mostly causal stuff? The intentionalist/functionalist debates, for instance, strike me as both interesting and instructive, in terms of how atrocities come to occur. But details about ovens or showers or what have you strike me as being mostly of niche academic interest.
As a non-holocaust denier, I find it hard to believe both that the focus on the story surprises you, or that you parse it as a "trifling detail". It shouldn't be hard to understand how being told a tall tale by authority figures, designed to make you hate and fear someone, back when you were too young to question it, only for it to turn out to be a fabrication.
I mean, I don't think I'd ever heard the word 'zyklon' in my life before I visited the Motte. I just wasn't told a specific story about how the Nazis murdered the Jews, beyond maybe a vague "they gassed them".
So I guess I'm completely unmoved by the idea that there might be a valid historical debate about the exact methods. Heck, the Nazis weren't the most scrupulously organised group in the world and the camps were mostly destroyed, so I would not be surprised if a range of techniques were used in different places. So I have no sense of there even being a tall tale.
What I remember from my childhood is that Hitler was bad, basically. I did units in school on the lead-up to WWI and then on the rise of fascism, but ironically I never actually did the wars. They weren't offered - we skipped from the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand to the Treaty of Versailles, and then spent a semester on Weimar Germany and Hitler's rise to power, and then we skipped the war itself and came back the next year with the WWII peace settlement and the beginning of the Cold War. Presumably it was felt that there was no particular need for kids to understand all the military maneuvers; and interested kids (like me) would just go to the library and read all the military history books and pore over the maps (which I did).
I don't remember ever doing anything about Stalin, since he leaves the picture fairly early in the Cold War. There was a very common unit in Australian high school history about the Russian Revolution, though, which I didn't do (I had a different course), but presumably would have covered that. So most of what I got was that Hitler is bad and Nazis are bad, and they came to power in such-and-such way, and these are the sorts of things we should look out for in case it happens again, but the blow-by-blow of the war itself was not covered. That also meant that the logistics of the Holocaust were skipped entirely.
It's not as though we did nothing about the Nazis and the Jews - I read The Diary of Anne Frank, and I remember watching and writing about the film Au revoir les enfants, though those were in English class and French class respectively, not history per se. But the emphasis in works like that is much more about the breakdown in social trust and solidarity, people informing on their neighbours, and so on. I don't mind that particularly, because I think that is in fact the most important lesson to take from the Holocaust.
Anyway, I suppose it's possible that if you were taught very specific details about the death camps and sacralised those details, then learning that they might be incorrect or debatable would be challenging? But that sounds like a very different form of education to the one I received, and to be honest one that seems to me to have quite strange priorities.
Again, I'm having trouble believing that this is how you are parsing what was said in the conversation. No one is focused on, or sacrilises, the specific details about death camps, it's that people recognize they were told a story to elicit a very specific reaction, and are now reacting to being deceived in a particularly underhanded way.
You can claim that he details of what happened in the death camps don't matter, but that's refuted by the simple fact that if they didn't matter, they wouldn't be taught.
That's a funny juxtaposition. I doubt I'd ever hear her name, if it wasn't for the exposure to American media.
But if nobody focuses on or sacralises specific details about the camps, then what is the deception? What is it that people recognise they were deceived about and then respond by questioning the entire event? The broad-strokes, big-picture narrative of the Holocaust (i.e. the Nazis, during WWII, deliberately attempted to exterminate the entire Jewish population of Europe, and transported them to death camps where they massacred them) is undoubtedly true, and if we agree that nobody outside a few niche obsessives particularly cares about the details of those camps' operation, what is the deception?
It's about the general levels of dehumanization and cruelty, not the specific ways they were implemented. The 20th century was full of totalitarian regimes that fell into genocidal insanity, but the Nazis are portrayed as a unique evil, and these sorts of stories are what props that portrayal up.
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I think that there are two possible reactions to being found out something you were taught at school is incorrect:
Either is a legitimate reaction IMO and which one you lean towards is going to be influenced by your circumstances and world view.
I think the reason so many people are stroking their chins and hinting meaningfully at 2 is that on the one hand there is so much evidence of authorities lying about things (vivid masks, black deaths from police shootings, the hilariously biased history lessons I used to have about the founding of the British welfare state and women’s suffrage) and so much guilt tripping based directly or indirectly on the holocaust.
Politically, it would be very convenient for European conservatives if the Holocaust stopped being considered Europe’s Original Sin / evidence of the fundamental evil that lies underneath all nationalism. So it’s only natural for them to interpret ambiguities or historical exaggerations in that light. Of course, I’m a nationalist myself.
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