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There are revisionists who believe that Jews died due to diseases like typhus as well as from starvation, but that this does not meet the criterion of purposeful holocaust / genocide. Or, you could even say it fits the criterion of “negligent genocide”, if you wanted to use such a term, but that this again does not reach the same peak of evil required for conscious and systematic genocide. According to historian Richard Bessel’s 2009 work on Germany in the year 1945, praised by the NYT for its sober and objective analysis, give or take 500,000 Germans starved to death or died from malnutrition in the final months of the war. If Germany in all its ethnocentric might was not able to feed half a million of its own people in 1945, then clearly they lacked the power and the will to feed those in concentration camps in 1945. As for why Jews were placed in camps to begin with, it must be noted that (according to those like Winston Churchill, no fan of Nazism) many of the original Soviets were Jewish, to a degree that the system was labeled Judeo-Bolshevism. The leaders of the failed November revolution in Germany were Jewish. Additionally, the international Jewish community had figuratively declared war on Germany (cue those old newspapers clippings “Judea Declares War in Germany”; remember Kristalnacht was a response to Jewish boycotts among the Allies). It makes sense in war that you quarter your ideological enemies. As Judaism conceived itself as a nation and not simply a religion, and has historically conceived itself as such, and actually still does today, it makes sense to not have a large group of foreign nationals roam free in your country. Hell, if we go to war with China, I would not exactly be opposed to first gen Chinese placed in a guarded quarter of a city (hopefully replete with all necessary accommodations and more, even swimming pools and a concert hall). If I lived in China, I would expect no less for myself down to the second generation. Hence why America had concentration camps for Japanese. I am not justifying Germany creating camps for those they see as a national threat. I’m explaining why they did this. As the reasoning makes sense from a position other than “we want to genocide them”, the mere existence of camps does not prove the holocaust.
Anton Joachimsthaler, another giant of historical studies, notes that Germany was aware of impending shortages and acted accordingly. As such you can imagine that they chose to redistribute goods that went to camps, to Germans in cities. He estimates up to one million Germans died from food insufficiency in the last year of the war. And this is sufficient in my mind to prove that, had Germans not dramatically gassed Jews, a huge majority would have starved to death anyway. In fact, it’s crazy to think there could be any holocaust survivors at all, given the level of food insufficiency. Indeed, the mere existence of holocaust survivors makes one puzzled as to why a genocidal regime would direct any food to concentration camp residents as opposed to Germans in cities. Why did they not all die, as you would expect from their genocidal sociopathy? Lastly, for another source, Ian Kershaw‘s 2011 work specifically mentions the destructiom of supply railways as a reason for the starvations. He pins the number at 500,000 dead from food insufficiency.
I am definitely not against revisionism discussions, because the holocaust is one of the most important events of the 20th century that still affects us today. The more important an event, the more it deserves people to attempt to nitpick and over-analyze. There is, of course, enormous reason for why the Allies would want it to be true that Germany gassed Jews rather than allowed them to starve. It weakens Germany’s morale, making them pliant to influence we still exert today; it allows for a geopolitical justification for the state of Israel that makes sense to the Western palette; it repudiates anti-semitism once and for all; and it staves off any criticism of the Allies for how it targeted supply chains and railways (not that this criticism would ever be legitimate).
Remember that in WW1, we used a ton of propaganda against Germany which was then proven demonstrably false. This was called atrocity propaganda and professors wrote books about it after the war. Atrocity propaganda is not unusual. It wouldn’t be some “new thing” the Allies tried after WWII, it would be the Anglophere strategy used from the Belgian Congo Propaganda War through WW1.
This is not true at all... the points of disagreement are:
There was no plan for the physical extermination of Jewry, i.e. the "Final Solution" was not the plan to secretly exterminate Jews in gas chambers.
There were no gas chambers disguised as shower rooms used to carry out such a plan.
The 6 million number is a symbolic propaganda number that doesn't have a strong basis in reality.
There are no Revisionists who deny the existence of camps, or deaths by typhus and starvation especially near the end of the war. There is far more variation on the mainstream side of the camp, where they cannot even agree on where the "Final Solution" actually came from- who, when, or why...
In contrast, there are no Revisionists I am aware of who make claims that are stronger than the three above, and they all agree on these three claims. I disagree with Revisionists on some matters of interpretation, but the points of disagreement are summarized above and held by all Revisionists.
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Because all holocaust revisionists are part of the same cabal, employing a 'strategy'. But they are so stupid that they can't get their story straight.
This is unlike holocaust believers who all believe exactly the same thing with regards to the holocaust, how it happened and why. Which we can see being the case in this thread...
Honestly, this rhetoric is so ridiculous and 'boo outgroup' it's self defeating. It's so far below the general standards of discourse here that I can hardly believe you wrote it.
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Even if I would accept claims that gas chambers and death camps were fake, then genocide by starvation is genocide anyway - so it does not change much.
And forcing Jews into ghettos created by Germans and trying to starve them is, I think, not disputed even by resident SS man?
Of course it would change much. Starvations are not unusual among the losing powers of war, and the starvation would be out of Germany’s control. There is also less planning, foresight, and direct involvement, which obviously reduces culpability. As an example, if a losing Ukraine has civilians starve to death, our media would blame Russia. If POWs starved to death during this same time, our media would blame… Russia.
Germans were deliberately starving Jews, imprisoning in newly created ghettos, forbidding them to work and so on - long before Germans were starving in cities.
Tragic situation ghettos was not out of Germany’s control, it was not even accidental or unintended mismanagement, it was entirely deliberate. And that is before we even start considering death camps.
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Let them out… to where? If Germans were starving in cities, where they had the most support, you would let out the camp inmates to… pillage other communities and starve in the wild? This doesn’t make much sense.
It’s important that we have clarity on hypotheticals before we begin to specify things within a given hypothetical. If prisoners starving is as morally significant as conscious, planned genocide, then there’s not even a reason to question whether the primary mode of death was starvation. If the hypothetical instead shows reduced culpability, then it’s not a meaningless question.
Germans were deliberately starving Jews, imprisoning in newly created ghettos, forbidding them to work and so on - long before Germans were starving in cities.
To say nothing about fact that starving was caused in both cases (of conquered people and of Germans) by war that Germans started.
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How would this be compatible with the "where are the bodies?" line of revisionists?
Also, as noted below, the timing doesn't match up.
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The problem is that whatever happened happened mostly in 1942 - 43, well before any Germans were starving. By the winter of '43 - '44 cities like Warsaw and Lodz were already empty of Jews, where there had been hundreds of thousands and millions before. Most of these people never saw the inside of a concentration camp.
See for example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warsaw_Ghetto_Hunger_Study and
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warsaw_Ghetto#Establishment_of_the_ghetto
300,000 Jews did not starve to death in Warsaw in the fall of 1942. They were rounded up and deported...somewhere. This is not in question, even by denies.
around 92 000 starved to death, with around 210 000 murdered in other way
basically noone was deported
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A good summary of the Revisionist position is "the things that have always happened in human history and war: concentration and forced labor, conscription, property confiscation, forced resettlement, death by shooting, starvation, death by disease- actually happened. But the things that have never before happened in human history: herding millions of men, women, and children into bedroom-sized gas chambers on the pretense of taking a shower and being gassed by engine exhaust, after which they were buried, and then later unburied, cremated, and the ashes were scattered to hide evidence that this happened, did not actually happen."
Some people want to say that concentration and forced labor, conscription, shooting, starvation, and disease still constitutes a Holocaust. That's a fine perspective, but the ones with the delegated authority on that matter do not allow compromise on the gas chamber narrative or the extermination camps or the elusive extermination plan.
David Cole for example has long tried to distance himself from Holocaust Denial, but the establishment still does not allow his "Auschwitz was not an extermination camp, but Treblinka, Sobibor, Belzec, and Chelmno were" conclusion to acquit him from the crime Holocaust denial. His YouTube channel was very recently banned.
Cole has retreated to Substack to host his content, but alas, Substack has attracted the Eye of Sauron for its relatively lenient moderation policy and is now on the chopping block.
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