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Look, I am willing to believe- I don’t believe it, I think the evidence is stacked against it, but I’m willing to believe it in the existence of a good argument- that Hitler did not intend to exterminate the Jews and German gas chambers were not tools of mass murder. I’m willing to believe the death total from the Holocaust was dramatically lower than generally believed. And I’ll even concede that Nazi Germany had the moral high ground on the eastern front compared to the USSR(but still in the sense of, like, the edge of the Mariana Trench instead of the bottom).
But it seems suspicious that of people making this argument- and I say this to Holocaust deniers in my ingroup- the argument makers(as opposed to fellow travelers and argument repeaters) can’t tell you if 200k-300k Jews dying from a combination of localized massacres and poor conditions in the camps is a tragedy that reflects a black mark on Hitler’s regime. Because Germany was quite clearly capable of running large scale prison camps with a normal-at-the-time death rate in conditions of wartime. They did it in WWI, after all. But even if the Jews in the concentration camps all died of typhus or famine or whatever(and I will concede that plenty of them did in fact die from this), that represents at least a lot of neglect from the German government and Nazi party for which they are morally culpable. Not to mention the massacres ‘in the field’ by einsatzgruppen. I’ve never seen a Holocaust denier even attempt to address the einsatzgruppen by the way; if it was all localized massacres that also seems like something Nazi germany is morally culpable for because they 1) had a policy to concentrate these people 2) per official state ideology considered them racial undesirables and 3) per official state ideology considered murder an acceptable way to deal with other undesirables, such as the disabled, and overzealous SS or Wehrmacht captains ordering massacres is what happens when that combination comes about.
Look, the eastern front was evil vs evil in a way that breaks most peoples’ brains. I don’t blame you for trying to resolve that ambiguity in your head by absolving the Nazis of guilt. And I especially don’t blame you for it when whites are under attack and anyone who defends them gets called a Nazi. But acknowledge what actually happened here especially when polite, intelligent people refute your arguments and provide high-quality, detailed, evidence-filled explanations of Nazi Germany being more evil to Jews than Israel is towards Palestinians a couple of times a month.
This is a funny way to put it, because the whole gas chamber story is really what aims to resolve the ambiguity not just on the Eastern front, but on the entire war. Imagine how ambiguous the entire war effort and war consequences become if you take the gas chamber story away. Certainly I accept greater ambiguity on the Eastern Front than the person who believes all the claims about mass gas chamber extermination of millions of people inside shower rooms...
Look at 2rafa's argument: What Israel is doing can't be compared to the Nazis. Yes, it can be compared because it is very similar in very concrete ways. It's only the gas chamber story that puts it in a different realm of reality, where it does not belong.
The death rates were "normal-at-the-time" throughout the war. Conditions became brutal in the final months of the war when the entire country was being destroyed and bombed on all sides, which did not happen in WWI. The gruesome footage captured by the Western allies at the liberation of camps like Belsen were not even filmed at the alleged extermination centers, and there is no footage or anything of those alleged massacres. Just eyewitnesses. The collapse of Germany was not planned, using the carnage from that to allege a planned extermination is not logical even if we accept custodial guilt for the conditions at the end of the war.
Address how? Revisionists accept the documents which do point to anti-partisan activities and reprisals. Revisionists point to the fact that no order has ever been found for the extermination of all Jews, just evidence of anti-partisan activity and reprisals. Partisan warfare was enormously detrimental to the German war effort, and reprisals were even legal according to international law at the time. German civilians were intentionally targeted by the Allies as well. What Israel is doing in Gaza right now is a reprisal against Gazan civilians. The reprisals were real, the gassing of millions of people inside gas chambers disguised as shower rooms was not real.
"Great Patriotic War" is considered sacred only in Russia, much more so in recent post-Soviet times than during USSR.
In the West, modern academic consensus is now that WW2 (at least the 90% of it that happened in the East) was fight between 100% evil and 99,9% evil.
Ernst Nolte was cancelled in his time, but his thesis won, to the dismay of remaining old time leftists.
And this trend will accelerate, both due to WW2 receding in historical memory and current events in Eastern Europe and Middle East.
No one is going to build any memorials to Nazi Germans any time soon, but Soviet monuments are going down everywhere outside Putin country.
Looks like mission accomplished, and without any questioning of "gas chamber story."
I am amazed that you don't think WWII is considered sacred and an unambiguous moral conflict in America. There is -zero- ambiguity in the mind of the public regarding that war, and the role of the United States in it, as anything short of a heroic salvation of the entire world, not just Europe. And that is foremost due to the gas chamber story everyone has been inundated with their entire lives in school, movie theaters, etc.
Even in this thread you have many people who refuse to accept that if Great Britain had remained neutral in Poland or Soviet war, there would have been no war in Western Europe. Even they cannot come to terms with the ambiguity of the decisions of the Western Allies to wage the war. They view it as inevitable when it was not.
The Western front is. All these heroic movies full of dead Nazis are set there.
Not the Pacific war (it is seen now as brutal white lynching of innocent Asian people), and definitely not Eastern front.
This thread was explicitly about Eastern front, and no one in mainstream media sees Soviets as the "good guys", no Hollywood movies celebrate heroic Red army mowing down these nasty Nazis. Today, most of Westerm normies are unsure if Russia took part in WW2 and on what side.
The entire Holocaust extermination program is said to have taken place on the Eastern Front in territory conquered by the Soviets. It's fair to say the gas chamber extermination program is the only thing the mainstream public actually knows about the Eastern Front. If you take that away, then the Einsatzgruppen reprisals, the mass resettlement of the Jews has a horrific basis of comparison with the Soviet conquests and massacres. Or the Allied Firebombings of civilian population centers for that matter. Nobody bats an eye at the firebombings of Berlin or Dresden, because the alleged extermination of millions of people in gas chambers disguised as shower rooms inside secret camps stands head and shoulders beyond all the other horrific realities of the war. It's an outlier, which should make one suspicious of its veracity.
The resettlement of the Jews, the Einsatzgruppen reprisals, the concentration camps... the firebombings of major civilian population centers, the nuclear attacks on Japan, the mass executions and mass rapes by the Red Army. There is actual ambiguity if you take that all in. But the public only really cares about the Gas Chamber claim, it cuts through all the other issues. And that's by design, and was accomplished by the conjugation of Hollywood and the apparatus of Stalinist propaganda. Without it, there actually is ambiguity on both fronts, not just the Eastern front.
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