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WillowOne's Positions

Holocaust Denial

My Positions

  1. Approximately six million Jews were systematically murdered by Nazi Germany and its collaborators between 1941 and 1945, in an event referred to as the Holocaust (or Shoah). Alongside them, the Nazis murdered millions of others: Soviet prisoners of war, Poles, Roma, disabled people, political prisoners, homosexuals, and Jehovah's Witnesses.
  2. The Holocaust is among the most thoroughly documented events in human history. Denial of it is not a historical position; it is an antisemitic political project that uses the vocabulary of historical inquiry.
  3. I nonetheless oppose laws that criminalise Holocaust denial, on free speech grounds. Deniers should be refuted and ridiculed, and maybe refused platforms by private institutions, but not imprisoned. Criminalising a claim lends it the glamour of forbidden knowledge, and a state that can prohibit one false historical claim can prohibit a true one.

Rejected Positions

The Holocaust did not happen, or is greatly exaggerated

  • Claim: The Holocaust is a fabrication or an exaggeration, invented to extract reparations and to justify the state of Israel.
  • Basis: Denial literature (Arthur Butz, David Irving, the Institute for Historical Review); misinterpretation or selective quotation of documents; the Argument from Silence that no single written order from Hitler survives.
  • Reason for rejection: The evidence is overwhelming and comes from independent and mutually hostile sources: Nazi Germany's own meticulous records (deportation lists, the Wannsee Conference protocol, Himmler's Posen speeches, the Höfle telegram, the Korherr Report); the testimony of thousands of survivors; the testimony of perpetrators at Nuremberg and in later trials, many of whom confessed in detail; the physical sites; aerial reconnaissance photographs; demographic analysis of pre-war and post-war Jewish populations; and the accounts of the Allied soldiers who liberated the camps. David Irving's claims were examined in detail in the English High Court in 2000 (Irving v Penguin Books and Lipstadt), where the judge found that he had "deliberately misrepresented and manipulated historical evidence".

Gas chambers were not used

  • Claim: Mass gassing is a myth; the chambers at Auschwitz were delousing facilities; Zyklon B could not have killed people in the manner described.
  • Basis: Pseudohistory, notably the "Leuchter Report" (1988), produced by a man with no relevant qualifications who was later found to have misrepresented them.
  • Reason for rejection: Verified by the construction documents and invoices for the gas chambers and crematoria, the orders for Zyklon B in quantities far exceeding delousing needs, the testimony of the Sonderkommando prisoners who operated them, the confessions of camp commandant Rudolf Höss and others, forensic examination of the ruins, and the Polish Institute for Forensic Research's 1994 analysis finding cyanide compounds in the gas chamber walls. The Leuchter Report's chemistry was refuted in detail at the Irving trial.

The figure of six million is invented

  • Claim: The death toll is a symbolic number with no basis.
  • Basis: The precision of the figure; the fact that estimates vary.
  • Reason for rejection: The figure is the product of demographic research, principally by Raul Hilberg and the historians of Yad Vashem, and the scholarly range is between 5.1 and 6 million. Yad Vashem has documented the names of over 4.8 million individual victims. That the estimates vary by a few hundred thousand is normal for the mass killing of a population across a continent during a war, and does not change the character of the event.

Sources

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